Law Sites
It certainly has been no secret that Thomson Reuters has been building its own proprietary large language model. In fact, in my June interview with TR’s CEO Steve Hasker, he talked openly about it, and just a few weeks ago, I reported on TR’s release of preliminary benchmarking data that showed impressive results comparable to the best general-purpose AI models.
But today TR makes it official, launching Thomson, an LLM that TR emphasizes was developed at a fraction of the cost of the frontier LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude and that TR fully owns and controls.
More importantly – at least when it comes to positioning within the legal market – TR highlights the fact that Thomson was trained and built using its own proprietary content built up over decades, as well as its own technology and, as it says, “domain expertise no other company can match.”
Joel Hron, TR’s chief technology officer, says this is an achievement that could change the economics of professional AI.
“For years, the AI industry has treated scale as the answer: bigger models, more compute, more money,” he says. “Thomson shows there is another path.
“Start with a strong foundation, specialize it deeply for the work that matters, and you can build intelligence that is highly capable, far more efficient and entirely under your control.”
Compared to the billions spent to develop models such as ChatGPT and Claude, TR says it has invested some $40 million into developing Thomson over the past two years, covering both talent and compute. And during a media briefing last week, Hron revealed that the final training run for the version launching today cost just $450,000.
“This $450,000 number I think is indicative of what we were able to do with our data and content on top of world-class open source models,” Hron said.
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