Andrew Burt watched clients increasingly look to bring artificial intelligence into their companies. But they kept running into the same barrier: A struggle to manage the risks and align the AI's use with their company's activities.
So he decided to take what the boutique law firm he co-founded, Luminos.Law, learned about scaling risk management and turn it into software. The culmination of that merge is Luminos.AI, a venture-capital company providing software meant to help companies address universal AI governance issues.
The new startup currently offers six products providing a range of governance tools, including automated reporting, bias calculation, legal privilege management and risk monitoring. Burt said the tools can help companies navigate a constantly evolving AI legal space as increasing scrutiny has been paid to how certain uses of AI can potentially violate copyright law, promote discrimination and infringe on privacy.
"So the thing that is going to make it succeed or fail is how well its behavior can align to evolving legal requirements," Burt said.
The current line of products were developed over the last four years. Burt indicated the team will be watching the regulatory landscape closely to know when updates to compliance features need to be made. That will be especially critical for products like their bias calculator, which is built using legal precedent language.
"We always say that this is not the ceiling, it's the floor," he said. "So if you're doing bias testing, at minimum you should be testing in accordance with legal thresholds and then on top of that you can do the existing research."
Luminos.Law already had experience helping build governance programs, auditing frameworks and red teaming generative AI systems. The firm's team, comprising lawyers and data scientists, had to decide if they wanted to keep their custom software to themselves or scale it up.
Because the firm is small, and law firms cannot accept outside capital, the decision was made to create a separate team and seek capital. They raised USD1.7 million in their first round of fundraising and plan to close on a second round soon, according to Burt. The funding helped establish Luminos.AI's small staff that's expected to grow in the near the future.
Luminos.AI's services are unique given not every company has the means or the data scientists to communicate important information with their legal department. Burt said Luminos.AI's objective is to streamline the due diligence and governance work, leaving companies with clear documentation they can point to and show legal footing.
Burt said those concerns were top of mind as they are developing Judicial AI, a product geared specifically toward generative AI's challenges. The software builds a legal constitution outlining what standards a model needs to comply with. The constitution is then used to train an AI "judge" which evaluates the output of an AI system to check for legal compliance.
Judicial AI is currently in the prototype stage and being tested with a select few customers. That care is especially necessary with the rapidly-changing generative AI industry.
"The best that everyone can do is is basically implement reasonable standards and look to the laws as they're evolving and the precedent, and make sure that everything they're doing is aligned as best as it can be," Burt said.
