The upgrade costs speed: code output falls to 150–180 tokens per second, from 160–215.
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Once a random hardware nerd lawyer on Reddit, the lawyer's responses to the original breaking story illuminated his identity. He’s a trial lawyer in Columbia, South Carolina. ProprietaryLegalAI commented on our first story three times, linking to a code repository, site, and LinkedIn that identify him as Nick Mermiges, founder of PLI Labs and proprietarylegal.ai. His other firm, PLI, is a technology consultancy, not a law firm, and now lists private, on-prem LLM serving as a service.
He built the software side with AI, specifically Claude Code, which wrote the kernels and ran the benchmarks with his direction. The Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.2 models handled the optimizations, custom kernels, and re-quantizing; he noted he was surprised at how well Fable built custom Volta kernels, and how it re-quantizes the experts his legal harness triggers. From about February to July, he built a legal harness around Claude that worked, while his attempts at a local-model version failed, but then DeepSeek V4.1 Flash arrived, and he was able to port it successfully, even if he says it’s not as good as frontier.
He reaffirms that “the documents never leave the office” and upgraded the system from 256GB to 1TB of RAM and tossed in a newer GPU, even as the V100s stay on “borrowed time” with R580, the last Nvidia driver branch to support them . The project’s intentions, as listed last time, suggested he wanted the system to be able to offload more of his workload, so this and the precision change are a reasonable upgrade. His previously stated goal of wanting the system to handle more than one request at a time has also been met.
The original “Volta sPLIt” build we covered has transformed into the “Volta Max uPLIft,” still with the clever lettering as his company’s initials are PLI — Proprietary Legal Intelligence. He now claims “near-NVFP4 precision,” having described NVFP4 on our forum earlier this week as “essentially full precision.” NVFP4 is Nvidia’s 4-bit floating-point format , and Nvidia publishes its own NVFP4 version of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash; the project’s README says that version matches the precision of the model’s official weights at 4.25 bits per weight.
Lawyer builds private AI server with eight used Nvidia V100 GPUs
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/lawyer-upgrades-eight-v100-private-ai-server-to-run-80-percent-of-deepseek-v4-1-flash-at-4-bit-nvfp4-precision-adds-1tb-of-ram-an-nvidia-rtx-3090-and-fixes-crashes-caused-by-a-bad-psu#main
- https://futureplc.com/privacy-policy/
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.