Ethan B. Holland

Over 51,300 manually organized AI links and counting

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AI Virtual Inn of Court September 2025 Member Meeting – Ethan Holland Presentation

Links to download the full presentation files:
Keynote version | PowerPoint version

Annotated Text Of the Virtual Presentation

This deck is a take home resource with everything you need to know.

It’s a labor of love from me to the Inns of Court, and I’m happy to chat with you any time.

Our goal today is a fun, educational, and inspiring opening to set the tone for a great year.

I’ll present for 20 minutes and then we’ll open to discussion.  I’ll pause for questions and feel free to interrupt me along the way.


About Me

30 Years Transforming Legacy Companies -> Digital

Burpee Seed Catalog
Print -> eCommerce

Jewelry Television
Home Shopping -> eCommerce

Currently VP Digital At Draper Media

English Literature Major

No Computer Science Courses

Fun Adventures Along The Way In My Career

Product launches with Mark Zuckerberg 

Keynote speaker at Adobe’s worldwide sales conference

Presented with Sam Altman (long before OpenAI)


In October 2023, I launched a weekly AI news blog, organizing links by hand.

I made a decision to be the most informed person in the room when it came to AI.

Even if it meant “getting weird”

Fall 2023

Guest author in Delaware Lawyer

“The AI Future: Exploring the Adjacent Possible with Emerging AI Solutions”

I still recommend reading the article as an introduction to AI and the impacts ahead of us.

The AI Future: Exploring the Adjacent Possible with Emerging AI Solutions

Every week I manually review, organize and publish 500-700 AI headlines into 46 categories.

98 weeks later = 36,100 links!

Reading 36,000 links has given me a “Spidey Sense” of where things are going.

I’m thankful to also serve on the boards of the Local Media Association and the Local Media Consortium

Guiding Principles

Any time we discuss AI, I recommend three guiding principles:

1) THE SUM is greater than the parts. 

Think about how things we see today will connect in the future.

2008: iPhone 3G adds GPS to apps

2025: Uber = $200 billion market cap

2) When discussing AI align your timetable with your audience: 

  • Short term
  • Mid term
  • Long term

Otherwise, it’s not the same conversation at all.

3) If possible, use the tool name or technology, not simply “AI”

GPT-5, Harvey, Gemini, Opus 4.1, Everlaw, Grok 4, Llama, CoCounsel, Mistral, ElevenLabs, Lexis, HeyGen, Flux, MidJourney, Mistral, Qwen, Deepseek, Runway, Kling, Viggle, NeRFs, LivePortrait, Gaussian Splats, Diffusion… 

Terms

Key AI Terms We’ll Discuss/Learn

  • Generative AI
  • Multimodal AI
  • Agents
  • Open Source

Common question: 

I hear the term “AI” being used a lot and I get confused. What is AI and how does it differ from Generative AI? Is that difference important and if so, why?

Term One: Basic Generative AI

  • •Traditional Chat (most familiar)
  • •ALSO Image generation
  • •ALSO Video creation


Images like the ones above are generative… but they are more like “grounded diffusion” since they have a reference image with a style applied on top of it.

If you ever want to learn how “image or video diffusion” works… (17 minutes, old but good)

To keep up with the latest image news in somewhat real time, I recommend following my image category:

https://ethanbholland.com/category/ai/images

Term TWO: Multimodality

Interacting with AI using audio, imagery, or video instead of chatting

Multimodal AI is most familiar for it’s ability to:

  • Track objects athletes, vehicles, targets
  • Analyze medical imagery
  • Dub voices for audio translation
  • Create video clones
  • Index the contents of images, videos, or documents (i.e. legal discovery)


Truly multimodal AI actually understands the sound waves of my voice as audio and does not need convert them into text. That’s what most people don’t realize…just as you hear and understand sound, AI understands sound.

For example, in addition to transcribing an audio file of two people talking, multimodal AI could note that silverware was clanging in the background, a cardinal was chirping, and an airplane flew overhead.

Multimodal Context Understanding

Actual interaction with Google DeepMind’s multimodal model “Flamingo

APRIL 2022 (3.5 YEARS AGO)

  • How many people are in this photo?
    • “There at least five people in this photo”
  • How many mirrors are in this photo?
    • “There are at least two mirrors”
  • What is the person on the scale doing?
    • “He is looking at the scale”
  • Where is Obama’s foot positioned?
    • “Obama’s foot is on the right side of the scale”
  • What happens as a result?
    • “The scale shows a higher weight”
  • Is the person on the scale aware of it?
    • “He is not aware of it.”

Multimodality might be new to laypeople, but here is an example of me from 2023… (first 90 seconds is a decent demo)

In 1995, I had a summer job as a paralegal and listened to audio of 100s of Meineke franchisee meetings.

Multimodal AI could have done an entire summer’s work in a few hours!

To keep up with the latest multimodality news in somewhat real time, I recommend following my multimodal category:

https://ethanbholland.com/category/ai/multimodal/  

Term THREE: Agency

Common question:
What is “Agentic AI” and how will that change what we are doing currently? 

AI taking actions on your behalf. Language is an interface

Like multimodality, agency helps us break away from thinking of AI as simply “chat bots”…

Agents work with tools to take actions on your behalf
Language is an interface.

The answer is not immediate like a chat. It’s important to select the proper tool.

Agentic Prompt: Example 1

(Actual prompt – will show the result at the end)

“I need to know about the enforceability of non-compete agreements in Delaware for mid-level employees in the tech industry.  Can you please:

  • Search recent case law and statutes in Delaware.
  • Summarize the current legal standard in plain English.
  • Identify any unsettled issues or conflicting rulings.
  • Draft a short client-ready memo (3–4 paragraphs) explaining the risks and likely enforceability.
  • Double-check citations against authoritative sources before finalizing.”
  • Email the results to these email address (attached Excel sheet)

I ran the agentic non-compete example.

GPT-5 Pro thought for 8 minutes and 51 seconds and returned a 7-page report.


I’ve included the results in an appendix at the end of these slides. 

Agentic Prompt: Example 2

“You are a trial preparation assistant. I am defending a medical malpractice case in Maryland.

  • Review the witness list and identify the plaintiff’s expert witnesses.
  • For each expert, gather prior testimony (from databases, publications, or reported cases) that might be used for impeachment.
  • Highlight inconsistencies between their past testimony and their current report.
  • Draft a cross-examination outline with 10–15 key questions per expert, grouped by theme (credentials, methodology, bias, prior inconsistent statements).
  • Flag any legal risks (e.g., evidentiary objections under Daubert/Frye).
  • Present the outline in a structured format I can take into court.”

To keep up with the latest agent news in somewhat real time, I recommend following my agent category:

https://ethanbholland.com/category/ai/agents-and-copilots

Group question:
“What are ‘prompts’ and do I need to be a “prompt engineer” to use these AI tools?” 

Let’s look at how I prompted this image edit….


MY PROMPT: “Redo this in the black and white style of the New Yorker”

RESULTING PROMPT (GPT’S internal translation)

Single-panel magazine cartoon, black-and-white pen-and-ink with graphite cross-hatching. Courtroom interior: judge on bench in back left (minimal face), scales-of-justice emblem on panel, a few faint gallery silhouettes. Foreground at counsel table: human lawyer in suit smiling and gently coaching a friendly, slightly nervous boxy robot in a suit holding papers. Hand-drawn frame around the scene. Clean white margin BELOW the frame for the caption. Centered caption outside the panel in a classic serif magazine style, EXACT text: “Follow My Lead.” No color, no speech bubbles, crisp linework, tasteful shading, slide-ready, 16:9

“The most obvious, lowest risk way to use AI (and to get a sense of how good it is) is to ask it for second opinions in your area of expertise. This works across most fields. And I’d go further: increasingly, not using AI as a second opinion is going to lead to worse outcomes.”

-Ethan Mollick https://x.com/emollick/status/1924152902907494870

Common question:
“I want to avoid hallucinations so what must I do when using an AI tool to prevent (or minimize) hallucinations?”

AI agent capabilities double every seven months

“Randomized trial AI for legal work finds Reasoning models are a big deal: Law students using o1-preview had the quality of their work on most tasks increase (up to 28%) & time savings of 12-28%. There were a few hallucinations, but a RAG-based AI* reduced those to human level.”
-Ethan Mollick, Wharton Business, March 2025

*RAG = Retrieval Augmented Generation
https://ethanbholland.com/category/ai/rag/

“This is the worst it will ever be”

Term FOUR: Open Source

You can download it, modify it, use it for free on your own machine.

The best open source AI is only ~10% behind the strength of the frontier models (GPT, Claude, Gemini).

“Open source” can refer to models and/or publicly available datasets

Impact = fewer moats for legacy software companies

“We open-sourced 99% of US caselaw… You can simply just build a wrapper around it and freely compete.”

“This dataset contains 6.7 million cases from the Caselaw Access Project and Court Listener. The Caselaw Access Project consists of nearly 40 million pages of U.S. federal and state court decisions and judges’ opinions. In addition, Court Listener adds over 900 thousand cases scraped from 479 courts. The Caselaw Access Project and Court Listener source legal data from a wide variety of resources such as the Harvard Law Library, the Law Library of Congress, and the Supreme Court Database. From these sources, we only included documents that were in the public domain. Erroneous OCR errors were further corrected after digitization, and additional post-processing was done to fix formatting and parsing.”

https://huggingface.co/datasets/common-pile/caselaw_access_project

3,898 downloads in August!

I keep a weekly category of open source news here:

https://ethanbholland.com/category/ai/open-source

Three Minutes Of Awe

1) Usage and Milestones
2) Investment Announcements

I’m putting a lot of information in the slides to read later.

For efficiency… I’m only reading the bold highlights.

Usage and General Milestones

  • February 28, 2025
    • OpenAI updates GPT 4.5
  • March 7, 2025
    • OpenAI Launches GPT-4.5 with Focus on “Human-Like” Interactions
  • March 21 2025
    • Meta’s open-source model Llama has hit 1 billion downloads.
  • April 18, 2025
    • ChatGPT now has 1 billion weekly active users.
  • May 02, 2025
    • Waymo has reached 250,000 weekly paid robotaxi rides across the United States in four cities.
    • Morgan Stanley forecasts 1 billion humanoid robots by 2050.
  • May 9, 2025
    • To test Google Gemini 2.5’s memory, professor Ethan Mollick gave the model the entire text of the novel War and Peace, added a single imposter sentence in varying places, and the model caught it every time.
  • April 4, 2025
    • Google announced that it believes artificial general intelligence (AGI) [superhuman] will arrive within a few years and they’ve started to release documents outlining what they are going to do to mitigate risks to humanity.
    • A therapy chatbot out of Dartmouth showed a 51% reduction in depression and 31% reduction in anxiety, which is comparable to traditional therapy yet available 24/7 and never tired or off duty.
  • April 11, 2025
    • ChatGPT can now remember and reference your entire conversation history going back in perpetuity.
    • University of California San Diego researchers demonstrated that GPT-4.5 successfully passes the Turing test. The AI system was able to fool 75% of humans into thinking it was human.
  • April 18, 2025
    • OpenAI claims that o3 is capable of generating original ideas.
  • April 25, 2025
    • Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, forecasts that AI will naturally evolve self-awareness within the next 5 to 10 years.
  • March 28, 2025
    • Google came out of nowhere and launched a new version of their Gemini model, and has completely destroyed the competition.
      • Gemini is now at the top of the leaderboards in almost every category, with 40-point leads in some cases.
  • May 02, 2025
    • Anthropic doubled down on their prediction that we will get Nobel Prize level artificial intelligence across domains at scale within three years.
  • May 16, 2025
    • Meta hired a new leader of advanced machine intelligence, which is their internal term for AI systems that match or beat human level intelligence across all tasks.
  • May 30, 2025
    • The leading AI models are now outperforming the average human on creativity assessments. They still fall short compared to the most creative humans, but average people are no match for AI in creativity tests.
  • June 06, 2025
    • In Nvidia’s quarterly earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang stated that billions of robots and hundreds of millions of autonomous vehicles will be developed in the near future. Jensen is not a hyperbolic person.
  • July 11, 2025
    • Nvidia became the first company to reach a $4 trillion market value.
  • June 14, 2025
    • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a blog where he states that AI has already passed human capabilities and we’ve begun a “gentle singularity”
    • Amazon has created an obstacle course to evaluate robots that they could employ to Rivian delivery vans and start to handle deliveries without humans.
    • OpenAI reduced their o3 model pricing by 80% while maintaining the same performance.
  • July 18, 2025
    • Chinese robotics company Unitree hit a $1.4 billion valuation.
    • Zuckerberg aims to create AGI in the next two to three years.
    • Nvidia launched a new technology that expands the effective context window of language models to entire encyclopedias. This means the same “next token almost instant” response of GPT 4, would be able to digest and reply to a single prompt the size of an encyclopedia… with the same speed as a single sentence prompt.
  • July 25, 2025
    • Anthropic announced that they processed almost one quadrillion tokens last month. That’s double the volume from May.
    • ChatGPT is now processing 2.5 billion daily requests worldwide. All of this usage has to be putting a dent in Google searches and web traffic.
    • Open AI boldly shared a lofty vision to build an artificial intelligence that will transform humanity into a new era of abundance.
  • August 2, 2025
    • OpenAI reached $12 billion in annualized revenue.
    • GPT usage has doubled since the summer of 2023, and 28% of employed adults use GPT at work.
    • Mark Zuckerberg released a statement about his position regarding Superintelligence.
    • BUT: Two thirds of US adults have still not used GPT – YOU’RE NOT ALONE
  • August 8, 2025
    • ChatGPT is on track to reach 700 million weekly active users by the end of next week. That’s up from 500 million users at the end of March and four times the weekly users at this time last year.

Now let’s look at investment headlines over the past 6-months.

Again, this is all in chronological order and everything is hand-curated by me.

Investments: AI is not slowing

  • February 28, 2025
    • Alibaba will invest more than $52 billion in AI over next 3 years
    • Apple will spend more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next 4 years
  • March 7, 2025
    • TSMC Expands U.S. Chip Manufacturing with $100 Billion Investment
  • March 14, 2025
    • Meta announced it is going to build its own in-house computing chips for artificial intelligence.
  • March 28, 2025
    • OpenAI is close to completing a $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank that would nearly double OpenAI’s valuation in just six months.
  • April 4, 2025
    • Open AI has secured an unprecedented $40 billion in funding, valuing the business at $300 billion.
    • Nvidia is in a bit of a pickle because Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance have ordered $16 billion worth of Nvidia chips. Nvidia has to decide whether to ramp up production capacity while risking getting banned from selling to China.
  • April 18, 2025
    • Nvidia announced plans to build $500 billion worth of AI servers in the US.  
    • OpenAI’s cofounder Ilya Sutskever’s company has reached a $32 billion valuation without a product.
  • May 23, 2025
    • OpenAI has partnered with the United Arab Emirates to build the first international deployment of its massive Stargate AI infrastructure platform.
  • June 06, 2025
    • Meta signed a 20 year nuclear deal to power their AI operations. Meta will be consuming the power equivalent of a city with 30,000 residents.
  • June 14, 2025
    • Meta is offering over $2 million annually to AI talent, with some packages reaching $10 million per year for its new “superintelligence” team, but still losing candidates to OpenAI and Anthropic.
    • Meta invested $15 billion in data training company Scale AI, and as part of the deal, Scale’s CEO Alexandr Wang is joining Meta as part of the super-intelligence team.
    • Qualcomm purchased a British semiconductor company called Alphawave for $2.4 billion in cash.
  • June 20, 2025
    • SoftBank pitched a $1 trillion artificial intelligence hub in Arizona.
  • July 4, 2025
    • Oracle and OpenAI have signed an agreement, as part of their Stargate project, to develop a data center with 4.5 gigawatts capacity in the United States.
    • Amazon deployed its 1 millionth robot across 300 facilities worldwide and developed an AI system that manages robot movements and can reduce robot travel time by 10%.
    • Meta officially established their super intelligence lab division hiring at least 11 researchers from AI companies, including OpenAI Google and Anthropic. These 11 hires have been offered compensation packages worth up to $300 million each with at least one recruit’s first year compensation exceeding $100 million!
  • July 11, 2025
    • Amazon is considering investing several more billion dollars in Anthropic. They already invested $8 billion last year.
    • Google ended up hiring the Windsurf team after OpenAI’s $3 billion acquisition attempt fell through.
  • July 18, 2025
    • Google announced a $25 billion investment in AI infrastructure in the United States over the next two years.
    • President Trump announced over $90 billion in private sector investments in the state of Pennsylvania. A single state! $90 billion. That’s in addition to Amazon’s previous $20 billion investment in the state.
    • Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would invest hundreds of billions of dollars in data center spending. One of the data centers will be the size of Manhattan.
    • Meta completed its three week hiring blitz (with $100 million signing bonuses) and officially announced its new AI lab. Two of the hires are poached employees from OpenAI.
    • Oracle announced it will invest $3 billion in Europe over the next five years. Total 2026 cap ex for Oracle is expected to exceed $25 billion. On top of that, Oracle announced a private unnamed deal in 2028 with a single client spending $30 billion.
    • The former OpenAI CTO and a few other ex-OpenAI employees (mostly the board shake-up Sam Altman ouster team) have raised $2 billion for their new company, Thinking Machines. It’s the largest seed round of funding in history. The niche appears to be multimodal audio and visual engineering.
  • July 18, 2025 (continued)
    • Elon Musk continues to pivot all of his combined company power to bolstering his AI training goals. SpaceX is investing $2 billion in xAI. Tesla shareholders may vote soon re whether Tesla should also invest. Musk is integrating his Grok LLM across his products in an attempt to blur the lines and enable cross company investment.
    • Microsoft is teaming up with Idaho National Laboratory (a very fun place to visit if you’re into history) to use AI to speed up the paperwork for nuclear power permits. This is directly related to the need/desire to create more electricity as quickly as possible to power data centers.
    • Anthropic is looking to raise new funding that would value the company at $100 billion.
  • July 25, 2025
    • Meta continues to poach OpenAI researchers, however information came out that at least ten OpenAI employees rejected $300 million offers from Mark Zuckerberg. Clearly these folks have faith in their product roadmap. To me, this is a poker tell that OpenAI has a plan.
    • Meta plans to build two enormous data centers, one in Louisiana and Ohio. The Louisiana facility will have one gigawatt of power and the Ohio center will have 5 gigawatts of power. In order to bring the facilities to market even more quickly Meta is using tents as temporary structures as the buildings are constructed.
    • Anthropic published a report this week as well arguing that the United States needs to make significant investments in energy in order to stay ahead in artificial intelligence.
    • Google reached an agreement to generate 3,000 megawatts of hydroelectric power.
    • OpenAI and Oracle announced they are expanding their Texas Stargate data center project and will increase capacity to over 5 gigawatts across the United States.
    • OpenAI expects to bring a total of over 1 million GPUs online before the end of this year. Sam Altman tweeted that he aims to reach 100 million.
    • The University of Bristol in the United Kingdom launched the UK’s most powerful artificial intelligence computer, which can perform 21 trillion operations per second.
  • August 8, 2025
    • The seven largest technology companies spent over $100 billion on AI infrastructure in the past three months; that’s more than all U.S. consumer spending combined in the last six months.
    • Meta is selling $2 billion in assets to help pay for its new data center infrastructure and growth.
    • OpenAI is reportedly working on a secondary sale that values the company at $500 billion.
    • Google created an AI for education accelerator that provides free AI training and career certificates to college students in the United States. This includes a $1 billion commitment to AI literacy.

The seven largest technology companies spent over $100 billion on AI infrastructure in the past three months; that’s more than all U.S. consumer spending combined in the last six months.

“If AI development stopped this week we would have 5-10 years of absorbing the impact of current models on education, culture, healthcare, and business.”
-Wharton professor Ethan Mollick 

Open Discussion and Q&A

Following this slide are all the resources you need to be fully informed!


Nothing beats human relationships!

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