Photo of Gareth Stokes

Bob Dylan famously asked, “How many roads must a man walk down, before you can call him a man?”. The power of the question is that there is no answer – and comparing the tribulations of one person’s journey through life to another’s defies any attempt at simple quantification. 

In

Continue Reading How many neurons must a system compute before you can call it AI? Unpicking the guidelines on the AI Act’s definition of artificial intelligence

It’s time to ensure your staff know how to tell weights from biases, and transformers from diffusion models.

2nd February marked the date the EU AI Act’s much-talked-about AI literacy requirements officially came into effect. Staff can no longer nod along when they hear explanations of ‘machine learning’ or ‘neural

Continue Reading AI literacy requirements are in effect : AI skilling and lifelong learning in the workplace 

If hearing the word “prohibition” brings to mind the moonshine, speakeasies, and bootleg liquor of 1920s America, you’re not alone. It conjures images from ‘Boardwalk Empire’ or ‘The Untouchables’.  But today’s prohibition isn’t about gin or whiskey – it’s about AI. With the EU’s new “prohibited AI” rules in force

Continue Reading A new prohibition era for AI: why you could be ‘bootlegging’ banned tech

In a recent webinar forming part of DLA Piper’s ‘Digital Evolution in conversation with’ series, Technology Transactions and Sourcing partner Lauren Hurcombe caught up with Gareth Stokes and Jeanne Dauzier, DLA Piper’s International Co-Chairs of the AI Practice, to discuss the opportunities and challenges posed by navigating AI from a

Continue Reading Unlocking AI and Sourcing 

Imagine a modern-day meeting room in a bustling corporate office, where executives and employees alike converse in hushed tones, no notes or minutes are taken, and their words disappear almost as quickly as they are spoken. Picture the scene: a CEO dispatches a critical strategy to her team, a manager

Continue Reading Gone in a flash: unravelling the mystery of ephemeral messaging

The creative process…

It’s 4:31 in the morning, a watery dawn is breaking, and I’m wafting down an almost empty M40 motorway heading to Heathrow for an early flight. The advanced autopilot features in the car are helping with the driving (in the UK it amounts to lane keeping and

Continue Reading The Road to AI efficiency: the trend toward smaller more performant AI and AI at the edge

The sci-fi fascination with AI is well established, long in the tooth and a lazy way of looking at the opportunities (and moreover the threats) presented by AI. But perhaps these once-fantastical ideas are rapidly becoming technological reality. That legislators, including the UK’s House of Lords, are looking seriously at

Continue Reading Building a smarter smartbomb: The Government responds to the House of Lords AI in Weapon Systems Committee

On 2nd February 2024 the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee (HoL) published its report on large language models (LLMs).

That report covered a variety of topics, with attention on two in particular:

  • what the HoL refers to as the ‘Goldilocks problem’ – or
Continue Reading Model behaviour: accountability, copyright, and the House of Lords Report on LLMs – Part 2

While much attention has been paid to the finalisation of the EU’s AI Act in recent weeks, developments in AI continue at a frenetic rate. On 2nd February 2024 the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee (HoL) published its report on large language models (LLMs

Continue Reading Who’s been regulating my AI?: Goldilocks and the House of Lords Report on LLMs and Generative AI

With great fanfare, and a Herculean final series of negotiating sessions stretching long into the night, political agreement on the EU AI Act was reached on 8th December 2023. This marked a big step closer to the first major piece of legislation regulating AI and its uses coming in

Continue Reading EU AI Act Update – Political Agreement Reached!