Wednesday 1 November 2023

My team has officially shipped something very exciting today!

Back in June 2023 I gave a presentation titled "Generative AI: Opportunities and risks for property transactions" in which I demoed an internal AI Assistant project that my team and I had been building ever since ChatGPT launched to the world in November 2022 and it became abundantly obvious this new Generative AI technology had the potential to transform the legal industry. We received a tremendous amount of engagement off the back of my presentation and much of it was from customers wanting to get their hands on this AI Assistant that we built so they could try it out for themselves. Because our initial AI Assistant was only an internal tool, we need to pull it out of our backend application and productionise it for law firms and other companies so they could begin trialing it and giving us feedback. 

Fast forward a few months once we had ironed out a number of challenging technical problems with building a bleeding edge AI system built on top of the latest large language models (LLMs), our own customised prompt engineering, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system and our own proprietary legal specific document OCR and structuring technology all the while controlling for the eye-watering costs of some of the more powerful LLMs like OpenAI's GPT-4. 

Today BCLP and Orbital Witness have publicly released the details of our "global design partnership to test, optimize and deploy Orbital Witness’ lease reporting capabilities in its latest generative artificial intelligence (AI) solution, Orbital Copilot, across BCLP’s U.K. and U.S. real estate practices." I'm proud to say that the AI Assistant I showcased at my presentation back in June 2023 has now taken on a life of it's own as Orbital Copilot and has a ton more functionality, improved accuracy, ability to work with any legal documents and is initially focused on lease reporting for lawyers and legal professionals as we build this out for BCLP and others. The press release goes on to say: "Orbital Copilot is the first real estate-sector-specific AI assistant created for real estate lawyers that is capable of analyzing and reporting on any real estate document. By leveraging Orbital Witness’ market-leading capabilities in real estate-specific AI and the deep sector knowledge and experience of BCLP’s global real estate practice, this first-in-market collaboration seeks to use this cutting-edge technology to enhance BLCP’s reporting on complex commercial leases, providing accelerated insights to their clients."

I'm also quoted in the press release alongside Samant Narula, BCLP’s U.K. head of real estate: 

Andrew Thompson, chief technology officer at Orbital Witness, says, “A key part of our strategy with Orbital Copilot is to develop real estate-domain-specific AI that enables us to deliver solutions for property professionals that are incomparable in terms of capability, quality and reliability. This collaboration and pilot program with BCLP allows us to demonstrate and test that value at a firm that shares our ambitions and vision for this technology.”

BCLP has one of the largest legal real estate practises in the country, so they're a brilliant law firm to partner with for the ground breaking Generative AI product called Orbital Copilot that we've just built and launched to the world.


Wednesday 21 June 2023

Generative AI: Opportunities and risks for property transactions

On June 14, 2023, Orbital Witness held an event for #LondonTechWeek to explore how Generative AI will revolutionise property due diligence. I gave the keynote presentation to a room of partners and innovation specialists from commercial law firms, residential conveyancing firms and LegalTech companies. 

Here is the full 38min video of that presentation along a product demo at the 32min mark. The product I demoed is an internal tool my team of data scientists and legal engineers built using a GPT-4 based agent and vector search on top of legal documents from HMLR such as title registers and scanned PDFs of leases and deeds of variation:

Here is the complete slide deck I presented for my keynote with all transitions intact (PDF version at the end of this blog post):

Here are all the references associated with various slides:



Thursday 9 March 2023

A collection of curated learning materials about Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4















Since ChatGPT came onto the scene on 30th November, 2022, I've been doing a deep dive finding out what exactly LLMs and specifically ChatGPT are capable of, what their limitations are and how we can use them at Orbital Witness (the company I'm CTO at). This was obviously important since we're currently building software that 'thinks' like a lawyer using the latest natural language processing (NLP). 

Given my current ongoing research on the topic, I'm going to use this blog post as a curated collection of the best content I've read across a variety of themes related to LLMs / ChatGPT / Dall-E 2 / etc. I'll update it regularly with links to new blog posts, podcasts, videos and anything else I find particularly compelling. The date in parentheses is when I added the link to this blog post and over time it will provide a change-log for easier reading. 

Overview

Prompt Engineering

Managing Context


Accuracy

Productivity

    User Experience (UX)

    Traction of LLMs

    Long-term Costs