The female tech entrepreneur that's propelling London's AI revolution

Tabitha Goldstaub is the force propelling London’s AI revolution. She talks hacks and sexist synths with Susannah Butter
Tabitha Goldstaub, co founder of CognitionX, pictured at their central London offices
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

There's a revolution under way — and a woman called Tabitha Goldstaub is on a mission to make sure not only that London takes the lead but that women are given an equal role in it. Goldstaub, aged 31, is the co-founder of CognitionX, which aims to bring clarity to the fast-paced world of artificial intelligence (AI).

“We’re like a Ghostbusters hotline,” she says. “When you feel lost and wonder who you’re going to call we have researchers who can answer big questions. AI will be the next industrial revolution, it’s happening quicker than anything we have ever seen. That’s why we’re here.”

This month’s NHS hack is just the latest reminder of how fast technology is developing and Goldstaub says it illustrates the need for widespread education and “collaboration beyond the tech sector, with government, academia and business talking about moving forwards with new tools”.

Sitting in an eye-poppingly pink chair at her company’s HQ at the Wayra incubator in Piccadilly, where she has a staff of 22 and is “expanding at a rate of knots”, Goldstaub explains how AI has the potential to detect cancer earlier than humans can, trade stocks, increase energy efficiency, predict human rights trials and make fairer decisions in courts.

Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

Already, 76 per cent of companies use some form of AI and it could add $814 billion to the UK economy by 2035, increasing productivity by up to 40 per cent, according to a report by Accenture. So we’d better get it right.

Goldstaub compares AI to a child, learning from what it hears. “If you train AI based on racist, sexist information, you can’t be surprised that it becomes racist and sexist.” She cites the example of the chatbot Tay, which was trained on Twitter and in less than 24 hours was making offensive remarks. “You’ll have AI making decisions about whether you can get loans, about car insurance. If it isn’t accountable we won’t know why it made a decision and that is why we need checks and balances.”

Working in a sector that is still being formed means a responsibility to get it right from the outset. “The most exciting thing about AI is that it’s an opportunity to redistribute benefits fairly,” says Goldstaub. “We didn’t think about equality and legislation in other tech revolutions but now is the time. The stakes are higher. AI can change the world for the better and the more women we get in the more potential we have for good rather than negativity.”

At the moment women are “seriously under-represented” in AI and that matters “not just because of workplace equality but if these machines are being programmed solely by men there will be repercussions in what they will be able to do. If we can get more women in the industry and more men thinking about the women in the industry we should be in a better situation.”

She is known in her team for calling out sexism and “shouting a bit louder”. “In big corporates women are expected to host and facilitate. I’ve had people wait for men to come into rooms before starting meetings, even if they are more junior than me.”

At home, she uses an Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant (“everyone should, it’s a way of getting used to AI and asking things of machines so it isn’t a shock when it becomes the norm”), and told her boyfriend that it won’t work unless he says please and thank you “because I couldn’t bear hearing instructions barked at a machine. I find it difficult that all the assistants are female, the argument is they sell better”.

Her solutions are practical. Next month, CognitionX has a conference discussing AI’s impact on 18 topics, from finance to ethics. “We need AI ethics boards and regulation, the government is bringing in new frameworks which will mean that the people building algorithms will have to think in advance about being transparent on how, say, a woman didn’t get a loan or someone from a lower economic sector didn’t get a mortgage.”

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Goldstaub, who is “painfully dyslexic and can’t code” came across AI when she was running a video distribution company called Rightster. “I saw AI was going to revolutionise our business but struggled to find out how. I always felt I wasn’t making the right decision; there was no community to talk to.”

Self-declared “gluttons for punishments”, Goldstaub and her co-founder Charlie Muirhead decided to “demystify this complicated space”. She recently showed some Lords and MPs Amazon’s Alexa at work, telling a company how many pork scratchings it had sold. “They were blown away. It shows AI could help you make decisions in the boardroom. The government are starting to take it seriously.”

Should we be worried about robots coming for our jobs? She smiles. “I sign my daily newsletter ‘Tabitha until the bots take over’ because my job is the easiest to automate in the company. But if we can retrain the population to work alongside machines we’ll have mass redeployment rather than unemployment, people will have new jobs or the same job with more productivity. We need people who understand how humans work — anthropologists, psychologists, English graduates — so we can train the robots.”

What about sex robots? “That’s happening. There’s two arguments, one is, ‘Great, maybe we can stop having women who need to do that’. The other is, ‘Are we making sex even more unrealistic?’ I’m normally the prude in these discussions.”

Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

Goldstaub frequently comes across less than squeaky-clean intentions. “A company recently called a meeting to see if it could change pricing on addictive games where you pay more if you lose. I play online games a lot so I would rather AI didn’t mess with me in that situation.”

London could be “the AI capital” if we play our cards right. “We have the opportunity to race ahead. It’s still the gateway to Europe. I voted to remain but we need to march forward now and make sure we get the best situation. The right to move will be important for AI. We already don’t have enough data scientists and engineers in the UK.”

Cyber-crime is one area where we are taking the lead. GCHQ has an incubator with Wayra that looks at cyber-threats. Goldstaub is calm about both fake news and advertising loopholes that let Islamic State publicise itself on YouTube. “It’s a challenge and there are algorithms making things worse but I’m excited about the companies making it better. Facebook and the BBC are writing bots that spot fake news.”

She’s worked in Silicon Valley and New York and says London is more diverse. “Silicon Valley has a bigger white dudes problem than here. It’s white kids building products for other white kids.”

Goldstaub never turns her phone off but she does accept the need to relax, something she thought wasn’t for her in her last company. She starts each day with yoga, then waters her roof garden, where she’s growing chilies, cucumbers and tomatoes. She lives in Shepherd’s Bush, 20 minutes from her parents. Her boyfriend works in property and farming and they spend weekends in Suffolk where there’s “a different pace of life” but it’s not a total tech detox — drones monitor the farm.

Until the bots do take over, Goldstaub’s mind is racing. “This is broader than just tech. It’s about how will it affect my workforce, public policy, will I have a job in five years time? We could not need to type soon. It’s hard for us to fathom how much AI could change the world.”

Follow Susannah Butter on Twitter: @susannahbutter

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