Exploring the Convergence of AI and Human Ingenuity with Matthew Blakemore

Episode 38 • 9th February 2024 • Creatives WithAI™ • Futurehand Media

00:00 - Voiceover (Announcement)

The Creatives with AI Podcast the spiritual home of creatives curious about AI and its role in their future.

00:08 - David Brown (Host)

Hello everybody, welcome to the Creatives with AI Podcast. I'm your host, David, and on today's show we have an excellent guest, matthew Blakemore. Matthew is an award-winning tech visionary, entrepreneur and strategist in artificial intelligence. He boasts over a decade of experience in propelling products from ideation to delivery and commercialisation. He celebrated for his thought leadership and dynamic public speaking, and he continuously sheds light on the expansive realm of AI and digital transformation. When I was researching Matthew, I could probably talk for another six minutes about all the stuff that he's accomplished and the things that he's done and the places that he's worked, but I think it's best if we just get straight into the conversation and I'll let Matthew give a little bit of background on himself. So, Matthew, welcome to the podcast.

00:57 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

Well, thank you so much for inviting me on to your podcast and thanks for the great introduction as well. I really appreciate that.

01:03 - David Brown (Host)

I literally don't have time to read everything that's on your LinkedIn. That would be the whole show.

01:09 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

Does anyone have enough time to go through all that? Yeah, no, I think it's. You know, I'm really interested to kind of have this discussion with you today and you know I've heard amazing things about you and your podcast as well, so I'm really excited to be part of it.

01:24 - David Brown (Host)

Thank you very much. I must send whoever that is a check. So I think I got introduced to you. I mean, actually we've been running in very similar circles in the London startup sort of ecosystem I guess you could call it for quite a few years actually, which we only just realized the other day when we did the intro call. So that was quite interesting.

01:47

But I was introduced to you specifically, I think, through Wynn, who is at the bridge who works for the government on the bridge AI program, and yeah, it just seems like you're an ideal person to talk to about some of this stuff. Yeah, you can hear all this stuff downstairs. Sorry about the background noise I'm in home people but yeah, if, maybe, if you could just start quickly and give some highlights of the things that you think are most relevant in your background and then we'll just sort of go from there.

02:17 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

t up my first company back in: 2014

03:24

We won University of Hertfordshire's Flare Award, which is their annual business award. I'm actually helping judge this year, so I'm quite excited to be going back and seeing all the exciting companies. And then we went through the London Accelerator Academy, which was brilliant, met so many great investors and advisors as well. It's run by Ian Merricks and we actually had a mentor, damon Bonser, who's the CEO of the British Design Fund, and his wisdom and support was fantastic and he managed to get us meetings and support from Arcadia Group, house of Fraser and other retailers. So, you know, really enjoyed that experience.

04:02

I guess the thing that did it for us in the end on that project was Brexit, sadly, because not because it directly impacted us, but because it directly impacted our customers. So the retailers because of the uncertainty, the fashion retailers were already struggling a little bit, and then the uncertainty caused by that vote meant that a lot of them unfortunately went bankrupt quite soon afterwards, and so I carried on pushing it as any entrepreneur would and trying to drive it forward, but it seemed that every deal we were doing was with a retailer that eventually went bust. So it was pretty tricky times.

04:38 - David Brown (Host)

Which is quite interesting that you say that, because I don't think a lot of people realise the impact that that really did have and I think you know there was a obviously there was a huge controversy over whether it should have been done and all of that at the time. But I think what's happened in the background is is a lot of businesses have struggled significantly with it. You know, I even know people who even small business people. There's a guy I had on a couple of weeks ago who runs a small reggae sort of radio station and was a DJ and he basically lost almost all of his business because it came from mainland Europe and as soon as Brexit hit and the rules started to change, he couldn't afford to do business there anymore and no one no one would buy from him because he had to. You know, he had to up the prices and everything else and all the customs rules and everything.

05:26

So, yeah, it's really interesting that you know that. You found that as well and I think there's a lot of. I don't know that we'll really know the full extent of it for another 10 or 15 years until you know we'll get some MBA students, we'll go in and do some really good research around it and something will come out. But yeah, yeah, it sucks.

05:47 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

Absolutely. I mean it was. It's been tricky for a lot of businesses. I mean we were. We were, I guess, in a more advantageous position than some because we weren't trying to trade overseas at that point. You know we were, we were just really working with UK retailers. But certainly I know several startups that were selling China sell products or SaaS products abroad that certainly found increased barriers and uncertainty tricky to their business as well. So yeah, it created a really uncertain environment, as we know, and that kind of went on for quite some time and and yeah, it did it did negatively impact the startup scene Definitely.

06:30 - David Brown (Host)

Sorry, I was on mute and so how did you move from there? How did you get into? Because I know you've been doing more stuff around AI and I think you've got some, even some patents and stuff around some AI technology. So how did you get from fashion to AI?

06:47 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

Sure, so when that looks good on me.

06:50

We actually worked with Tom Mason, who's now the CTO of stability AI and he was effectively our CTO at that point, and we worked with him to develop an algorithm off the back of cloud sites visual recognition technology which was to identify the clothing items people were trying on in store and actually be able to suggest other items in store from the stores inventory, so giving them the more connected experience that you experience online when you're looking at clothes, for example.

07:22

And so building on that, you know, understanding how to develop an algorithm, understanding the work that goes into to visual recognition technology and the, the partnerships we built in in that looks good on me project really kind of set in motion my interest in artificial intelligence.

07:43

And you know we had great, really interesting meetings with Amazon at the time about incorporating the work that we were doing into the, into the echo, so into the echo devices, so putting a camera in them. Now I don't know if Amazon were already working on it. We had an NDA in place, but several months after our meeting they launched a project called Echo Look, which was to provide fashion advice using a camera in the echo device. So I'm not sure if I'm not sure and I can't possibly say if they copied our algorithm directly, but what I will say is is, months prior to that, we actually shared with them our proprietary algorithm under an NDA to say look, this is what we're doing, we think it, we could work with us to do this within the echo, so I'll leave that listeners to decide what happened there.

08:35 - David Brown (Host)

It's tricky, that isn't it. It's really tricky because I will. Companies shall remain nameless, but I have worked for two separate companies startups in the past that went to that joined the Microsoft partner program and wanted to partner with Microsoft because the technology would fit very well into other tools that Microsoft had.

08:58 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

Yes.

08:59 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, part of the agreement that Microsoft does with companies like that is, before they'll integrate any of your code or do anything with you, you have to put the code in escrow, because they have to check it for security, which is their position, that they have to really investigate it in detail because they need to make sure that you're not putting any backdoors in and all that sort of stuff.

09:19 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

Yeah.

09:20 - David Brown (Host)

And then, miraculously, six months later, microsoft rolls out a product that looks identical to the one that you've been trying to pitch to them. Now I'm not saying I'm not saying for sure that Microsoft are stealing people's IP, but when it happens more than one time, it starts to feel a bit suspicious. So I can empathize with you because I've had the same thing happen with big companies and I know, as I know. We're talking a lot about startups, people, but we will get around to AI eventually. That's one of the things they say today. It's like everybody's like don't send me an NDA to sign because I'm not going to sign it, because who cares, it doesn't matter, no one's going to copy it. But actually, when you do go to some of the larger companies, I think if you do have a really good idea and something that they genuinely think that they can implement, you do have to be careful, particularly if it's a new IP and something that's maybe not tremendously difficult to do. Yeah, yeah.

10:18

They can just go. Yeah, but we've been working on a project like that for ages and like what are you going to do?

10:25 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

I mean, I guess the analogy that I would use when you're running a startup is you're a little bit like an antelope being chased by a group of lions.

10:34

And it's not just big tech, it's also, you know, when? I don't know if they're still around, but when we were working on our projects, there was also a company called Rocket Internet that had a pretty dodgy reputation for effectively taking ideas that were working well in some countries and then rolling them out with a lot of money behind them in other territories, before the original company could actually expand there, which I would consider unethical. But, but you know, it was a business model that seemed to work very well. But there was a lot of things like that where it was very tricky, because I remember, actually at the time as well, there was, there was a book that came out from a tech leader and I can't remember his name for the life of me, but it was effectively arguing within that book that companies like Apple I think it used Apple as an example was so vast and so large that you could give them a brilliant idea and they wouldn't be able to implement it. Well, I think that's not true.

11:33

It's really not true, but that was actually used. In a lot of presentations I went to when investors were speaking they were saying you know, startups are too worried about their own IP and actually I think what we've seen. You know there has been a lot of court cases in the US about a particular investment fund. It was called the Alexa fund, run by an arm of Amazon.

11:54 - David Brown (Host)

Right, okay.

11:56 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

Where they do actually have evidence that IP was stolen through that fund. So there's things like that where you do have to be extremely careful, because big tech both offer opportunities to startups by providing them with cloud services and things which they couldn't possibly develop on their own, but at the same time, if you have a fantastic product that they think can earn money, then, unless they acquire you, there's a possibility that you will find yourself on the end of them taking your idea and implementing it themselves.

12:34 - David Brown (Host)

And I suspect that this is only going to get worse, because I know there are some AI platforms out there today where you can say you know, write me a UI that looks like Twitter and it will literally go and create the entire, all the code for the UI to look exactly like another product, and it's lowering the bar. You know that used to be. You used to have to have a lot of skill and a lot of knowledge and time and resources. I mean, okay, if you were a software engineer, you could sort of sit in your bedroom at night and work on it as a side project if you wanted to and you could. You know you could eventually build something, but it took a long time and you had to work those extra hours and you had to do all that and you had to have a lot of specialist knowledge, whereas today, with all of the AI tools that are out there, you don't need that anymore. No, no.

13:28 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

No, you don't. It's true, and as these generative AI products improve as well, over time, it's going to become easier for others. I mean, it's quite interesting. Actually, while we're talking about this particular topic of generative AI and also copying other people's ideas, I don't know if you saw one of the main issues that's occurred with the new open AI GPT store, where, effectively, someone has launched a GPT products that they spent a long time creating and then people have just simply copied it and launched it under exactly the same name or a different name and claimed it as their own, and so you've got the store now with multiple versions of exactly the same tool and you're completely unsure who actually came up with it in the first place. So there is absolutely IP challenges in the industry, and as these tools get more and more advanced, as you say, and the barrier to entry becomes smaller and smaller, it's going to result in a lot of copying and the original innovators potentially losing out.

14:29 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, I was just. I was at a meeting the other day with Adelaugh Firm where we were talking about copyright and that was one of the examples that came up. So not only is it about the models being trained and all of that, but then it's if you develop a tool like one of those specialist tools that's in the store and then just the blatant copying of it, and it's almost like and my question became well, is it just basically a fancy prompt that somebody set up that it kind of has a background prompt and then you can ask it a question, but then it filters the results in a certain way and I'm like there's almost no way you can stop that. I guess in theory you could copyright, which is kind of how software goes right, like they copyright the code itself as text, and then that's how a lot of software is protected.

15:20

Again, we're getting way in the weeds for people. But that's okay, I can learn something, and I guess that's the only protection maybe that you could have is under copyright, that somebody's used your copyrighted prompt to then, you know, develop a tool that works. I don't know, man, it's really come. It's complicated, isn't it? I don't think we have the last to cover that really.

15:45 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

I'm not sure we do yet.

15:47

I mean also traditionally it's been very, very hard for startups to protect their inventions and it's something that no one really wants to talk about. But there are significant barriers both from a trademark perspective and the patent perspective and copyright perspective for startup companies. And the issues are you know, cost. For example, if you wanted to patent something, even in just the UK, if you want to get a patent lawyer on that, that's thousands of pounds Equally in the UK. Until very recently you really stood no chance whatsoever in in pacifying anything that was software related. They've just actually changed the law in the UK in the last month or so so that they are more in line with the US and they do allow now AI solutions, for example, to be patented. So they've kind of relaxed their view on software and an AI in that respect. So you can now at least file patents. But then there's still the cost implications of doing so, which startups will struggle with and that puts them at a disadvantage massively.

17:00

And then you've got issues, as I say, like trademark. So if you used to file a trademark in the UK, you used to get covered across the whole of the EU. You don't do that anymore because of Brexit. So you file a trademark in the UK, you only get the UK, and then it's thousands of pounds to get Europe, and then you obviously need to do the US as well, which is more money, and startups don't have this sort of funding to do that, and it was interesting that this week the EU have announced a massive pot of funding to support their SMEs and their startups, and actually they already offer startups support in securing trademarks, like massive discounts and things, if you're based in the European Union, and so people in the UK trying to set up companies at a distinct disadvantage at the moment, and there doesn't seem to be that that realization, because we've got a huge market on our doorstep but we're competing with companies in that market already and we need more support.

18:01

I think.

18:02 - David Brown (Host)

What was really to build. On that I totally agree with you, and I think the other challenge that we have in Europe sort of in all of Europe that we've had for a long time is also the attitude towards investment in innovation from the start, compared to the US. In the.

18:20

US. It's much easier if you just have an idea and a deck, if you just go out and pitch the idea, you could get. It'd be. I say, easy, but it's much easier. You could walk in and say, look, I need three to $10 million to get this idea off the ground. It's going to take three years to build it. Here's the plan. And they say, well, what have you got? And you go I've got nothing, I've just this is the idea. We've done the research but we need the money to get started and you could get that funded in the US but in Europe that would never happen.

18:49

Like in Europe, you have to build it. You might get some 150K sort of SEIS money, maybe a little bit extra EIS money to sort of help you along, but you get basically nothing when you start off until you've built up a customer base. You have a working prototype like you've got all that. You know you've got an MVP and people are starting to use it and you've almost proven product market fit. And then that's when the millions come and it's a totally different. It's a totally different ballgame and you know you're if you're trying to compete with someone from the US who has a couple of million pounds to start off with, and can afford to, to register those patents and those trademarks and everything. It makes it really difficult. It really does, yeah.

19:35 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

I mean, there's no coincidence that a lot of the companies in the UK that have reached unicorn status started off with very wealthy founders in the first place, because if they've got money to put in, then it gives them an opportunity to grow. And equally, actually I know some fantastic startups, not just in the UK but in Europe as well, that go to the US, to Silicon Valley, to raise their, to raise their own.

20:00 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, yeah, I mean that's the that's. The other thing is, you know, get your very early start here, get your sort of get your shit together and then go to the US and, you know, join one of the big accelerator programs there, or you know something like that and really try and get your start.

20:18

What was the other thing I had? Another thing I wanted to bring up. Oh, the other thing that was interesting is so I go to these big shows like Mobile World Congress and there's also a Smart City World Congress that happens every year. So Smart City was in November and Mobile World Congress is in February, march time, yeah, and before Brexit I remember those shows were huge and used to go to those shows and there would be tons and tons of UK companies there.

20:50

You know the UK would have a big pavilion and they would. You know there'd be all sorts of companies represented there. And I've done that with a couple of different companies and been to those shows and you could walk around and you could talk to the different European companies and you could say, oh, I'm from the UK and you'd have a. You know, they'd be really engaged, you'd have a conversation. So about a year I guess it was after COVID, really so Brexit had really had time to sort of get entrenched in business and I remember going to the first show and walking around and first of all, there was maybe one UK company, yeah, and second of all, every place that I went to and tried to talk to them and said hey, I'm from the UK. Blah, blah, blah blah they go.

21:35

Yeah, we don't do business in the UK anymore and it was like really, cause we think it's this big market and we're the fifth biggest economy or whatever it is, and they're like, yeah, it's not worth the time and the money, but like, compared to the rest of Europe it's such a small market and now it's so much trouble to deal with it. We just we closed our office and we don't even deal there anymore. We have like one commercial person on the ground who works from their house, but that's it. And I was shocked at, actually, how many companies had said that that were big companies that I'd sort of worked with in the past and, yeah, people just sort of bailed. So it's a it is a difficult sort of position.

22:20 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

I mean. What we've seen certainly is cities like Amsterdam have hugely benefited from Brexit, because a lot of companies have moved there and they've done so for an office, and Dublin is another one that's benefited. Yeah, Dublin for sure you know companies want a European base. I mean it's interesting that you know recent oil can move to his hedge fund base to Dublin.

22:45 - David Brown (Host)

But let's not touch on that.

22:49 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

But you know people want access to the single market, right, and it's interesting that you know Northern Ireland is currently in a very advantageous position because it's got access as well and we've seen companies move to Belfast to access that benefit as well. So I mean it's obvious to many that you know having access to the UK market and the single market is better than just having access to one of the other.

23:12

So, yeah, I mean it's an interesting situation, put it that way, I mean.

23:16

What I have seen, though, is some fantastic work from London and partners, because I do a lot of stuff with them, and London and partners have been around for a long time.

23:23

They're actually funded by the mayor's office in London, and they go around and support businesses looking to come to the UK and encourage businesses to come to London to set up base here, to kind of employ people here, and what we've seen a lot of is startups and companies that have already kind of established themselves in the single market do want to come to the UK as almost a test bed for going to the US.

23:49

So the UK's become a bit of a kind of an intermediary, so if you can succeed in the UK, you can succeed in the USA, and, equally, we've seen businesses that are succeeding in the USA come to the UK first to then be a launchpad for going into the single market. So the UK is, as I say, acting as an intermediary, really, and as a test bed for companies from the US and companies from Europe to go across the pond. So we have benefited in that way, and, as I say, london and partners I can't recommend them enough. I mean, they're doing their third cohort now of Grow London, which is all about supporting startups and things, and they offer so much free support. Really, I just wish they'd been around, really when I was at my own company. They would have been a massive, massive help.

24:39 - David Brown (Host)

So what are you? Right? So we'll go back to AI again. We got totally off track again, sure, so going back to AI. So what are you working on now? Because you've got an AI company now, don't you?

24:50 - Matthew Blakemore (Guest)

Yeah, so basically for the last five years I've been working in the media and entertainment sector and I oversaw the digital transformation of a UK regulator that deal with age rating video content so they do all of the age ratings of cinema and DVDs and, increasingly, online material and so I was brought in to kind of product manage a lot of the delivery of a cloud system for them. And then, off the back of that, I ideated, invented two AI products and saw them through One of them all around delivering more value for customers. So instead of just delivering UK-based age ratings, delivering multi-territory age ratings, and that's the one that's got the patent in the US. And then the second was actually a really exciting project with Amazon and University of Bath, so a secured innovative UK funding, and we worked together on developing a multimodal AI system to recognize issues within video content, and by issues I mean violence, for example, but, and its severity. So where is this? Tools right now, like Amazon recognition, that recognize where violence occurs? It doesn't actually at the moment indicate any sort of severity level, and so what we were trying to do was something quite groundbreaking using visual recognition, audio recognition and speech recognition simultaneously to kind of come up with a judgment, and so we actually unveiled that last year in June at London AI Summit for violence, because we got it working for violence before that conference and it was really exciting to see the audience's reaction because it was a real step forward.

26:40

So yeah, having kind of overseen both of those projects, had the experience previously with AI, it looks good on me.

26:46

I kind of felt like now is the time to pull all of that expertise together, all of that experience together, all of my experience as well from working in AI standards so working for the British Standards Institute and the International Standards Organization for the last four years and developing the AI data lifecycle standards and contributing to the other AI standards as well that I could bring that expertise together and put it together with contacts that I've made along the way in a consultancy that offers businesses the opportunity to really work with us to understand how to build an AI strategy that's responsible and ethical and how to deliver an AI project. Because I think so many companies at the moment are exploring artificial intelligence. They, their boards, are putting pressure on them to kind of incorporate artificial intelligence into what they're doing, but they don't necessarily have that expertise or understanding about the complexities of doing so and the things they need to bear in mind and the things they need to set up to ensure, as I say, that the project is responsible and ethical.

27:55 - David Brown (Host)

That's a great point and it's really interesting as well because a lot of the stuff obviously this is creative with AI podcast, so we're concerned a lot with the generative AI and some of the new tools that are coming out and that sort of thing. But one thing that started to come up and this is what gives me a little bit of hope, I think is what's starting to now come out are the actual business applications for AI, and the business application for AI isn't writing blog posts, right, Like that's not where the value of AI comes in. I think the real, true value that we're gonna start to see from the more complex algorithms and the things that the new style AI can do are things like looking for violence but being able to be much more. What's the word? I'm looking for? Finesse, To add a lot more finesse to what at the minute is quite a blunt tool. And that's what you're saying is you can now you can add that finesse to it and you can say, yeah, there's some violence, but actually it's mild, or yeah, there's some violence and this is extreme, as opposed to just marking it all as violence or not violence.