Episode 3: What makes Ontra Synapse AI unique?

Video Transcript

Hi everyone, welcome back to Machine Learning With Luca, where you get real answers to all of your AI questions.

I’m your host, Gianluca Rossi. I lead the machine learning team here at Ontra and I’m responsible for Ontra Synapse — the AI built specifically for the private markets.

Let’s get learning!

Today’s question comes from Caitlin who wants to know, “Ontra has been talking a lot about Ontra Synapse AI. What makes it so unique?”

Caitlin, you’re absolutely right! We’ve recently made some big announcements about Ontra Synapse and we’re very excited about the technology.

Here are the key points you need to know:

There’s no doubt that the legal burden in the private funds industry has grown exponentially over the past decade.

This trend won’t reverse itself in the coming years. In fact, the load that internal legal teams carry will only get heavier.

Fortunately, AI will give these teams a massive productivity boost.

In our last episode, we talked about three aspects of legal use cases that have proven to be particularly challenging for AI — legal contracts contain highly nuanced language, legal use cases are very specialized, and accuracy is extremely important in the private markets.

After evaluating a lot of technologies, we realized that none of them were successfully delivering across all of these fronts. That’s why we built Ontra Synapse. AI built specifically for the private market.

So here’s a high-level overview of what makes Ontra Synapse unique.

It comes down to the training data we use, our ML models, the way we combine AI and human expertise, also the way we seamlessly integrate AI into our applications.

Let’s double-click on the data we use to train our models.

It’s aggregated and anonymized information that comes from over 800,000 negotiations that we’ve processed on the Ontra platform.

Why does this matter? Let me use an analogy. You may have noticed that I have a bit of an accent. People ask me all of the time if I’m from Texas (just kidding).

When I learned to speak English, I needed to build up a vocabulary that was specific to the environment I operated in.

Even after becoming fluent in English, I had to learn a new set of words to interact with my colleagues at work.

One reason most models fall short is because of their “limited vocabulary.” They’re trained on generic data from sites like Wikipedia, and they don’t have enough exposure to specific legal language.

Ontra Synapse, by contrast, can handle complex legal language because it is trained on large volumes of high-quality contract data.

Secondly, Ontra Synapse addresses specific private funds legal use cases.

Most models are designed to perform tasks that are useful in multiple industries.

But if a lawyer is trying to summarize a contract or surface precedent based on previously negotiated contracts, generic models start to break down.

Since Ontra has processed more routine contracts than any other legal tech vendor
we can deliver the highly targeted solutions our customers need to get the job done.

We’ve also embraced a human-in-the-loop approach to ensure that Ontra Synapse delivers the level of accuracy legal teams demand.

You’ve probably seen headlines about high-profile mistakes made by lawyers who fail to fact-check AI outputs.

We avoid that issue by running all Ontra Synapse answers through our global network of contract lawyers.

And in those rare situations where the model is inaccurate, we use lawyer feedback to improve performance moving forward.

Whether you’re negotiating a document or following through with a contractual obligation, we serve up the insights you need, when you need them. Ontra Synapse is in all of our products.

Ok, there’s a lot more to explore but here’s the headline — Ontra Synapse has been built from the ground up to meet the exact demands of private equity.

Caitlin, thanks for a great question.

If there’s anything you’d like to know about AI, send us an email to [email protected] and I’ll be sure to get back to you. And if we end up reading one of your questions in these episodes, we will send you one of our famous Ontra mugs.

Keep Learning! I’ll see you next time.