GEAB 181

This month we had the pleasure of discussing with Dr. Maria Moloney what 2024 may bring regarding AI and data protection innovation, as well as issues of European and global legislation regarding those matters. Maria holds the position of Senior Data Protection, Security and AI specialist in an Irish technology company entitled PrivacyEngine. She has a doctoral degree in Information Systems from Trinity College Dublin and her mission, as a consultant, is to look at data protection, security and artificial intelligence, from a compliance perspective. She works with large private companies in Europe and in America, as well as public administrations.

Progress and research on AI is going to be even more intense in 2024 than in 2023, in my opinion. I think we’re just seeing the beginning of AI systems and their uses. There has already been a lot of talk about generative AI but I think more is to come in 2024 and 2025 in terms of just understanding exactly how these models can be used in business, what the benefits are of these models but also what are their drawbacks. In 2023, focus was on large language models, now in 2024 we’re going to be looking more at multi-modal AI models. Chat-GPT 3.5 looked at text interpretation whereas now GPT-4 combines various modalities like text, audio and video. As a result, these AI models can give much more intuitive responses. To be honest, it’s an exciting place to be working right now, in this area.