Agree. It is amazing that you can run an o1 style model on a Mac. I was able to run QwQ on my 24GB M3 MacBook Air, though results on complex reasoning on domain specific tasks did not work well, and I saw the Chinese 'thinking' too (they don't work well in o1 either). It opens up experimentation which is great, and the reasoning traces for domain specific tasks for RL is where the next improvements are going to come from
legal reasoning involves applying facts to the law, and it needs knowledge of the world. the expertise of a professional is in picking the right/winning path based on their study of the law, the facts and their real world training. money is in codifying that to teach models to do the same
the big frontier models already have all laws, regulations and cases memorized/trained on given they are public. the real advancement is in experts codifying their expertise/reasoning for models to learn from. legal is no different from other fields in this.