IP and the Wild West Landscape of AI

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I speak with Allison Gaul who serves as legal counsel for Boston Consulting Group. She is responsible for evaluating digital products with an eye towards intellectual property strategy, value creation, and legal risk. She is also a recovering, or at least former patent attorney. She does still advise BCG on patent issues, but she is not drafting and prosecuting patent applications at this point. We begin our conversation with me asking about what she believes are the biggest legal issues in the IP world today.

Gaul did identify several things that stay top of mind for her, with various issues relating to data front and center as the top issue. The second area identified by Gaul was open source, and how many of the AI companies promoting “open source” are really not truly open source because often the model, weights and/or training data are not made available, which makes it seem like these companies are racing to gain market share and ultimately “doing a little bit of a switcheroo.” The third and final thing that Gaul identifies as being constantly top of mind is the overall speed of AI development.  

We also discuss how the future will likely have a handful of very large companies that provide the backbone of future AI tools. These large AI giants will be very good at machine learning and very good at digesting massive amounts of information. Then we will likely see silos of expertise established. These silos or niches will be dominated by small companies that operate within a niche industry that they know really well. Indeed, we are already seeing small companies developing specific tools that are much better for a specialized purpose because they understand what that specific industry of subset needs.

We go on to discuss fair use, particularly discussing the legal troubles facing Meta, and ethics around AI development and use, as well as the importance of prompts and how it is frustrating—to say the least—that AI companies do not seem interested in helping users learn how to get better at prompting AI tools to get better results. 

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