Iuliia Gorshkova

Artificial intelligence systems are no longer just tools; they are becoming collaborators, decision-makers, and autonomous agents embedded in the critical infrastructure of our digital lives. As these systems grow in capability, they also grow in complexity, opacity, and potential for failure. Traditional software development relies on rigorous testing, but testing for AI is fundamentally different. [...]

There's a pervasive myth in the startup world, particularly among engineering teams moving at light speed, that security is a perimeter problem. We build our walls high, install sophisticated gates in the form of firewalls and authentication layers, and assume that whatever happens inside the fortress is inherently safe. When it comes to traditional software, [...]

When boardrooms discuss artificial intelligence, the conversation often orbits around efficiency gains, competitive advantage, and the sheer novelty of the technology. While these are valid points, they represent only the visible surface of a massive, submerged structure. Beneath the glossy promise of automation lies a complex web of risks that can fundamentally destabilize an organization. [...]

The Illusion of the "Safe" Deployment There is a pervasive, almost seductive narrative currently making the rounds in boardrooms across the globe. It suggests that Artificial Intelligence, particularly Generative AI, is simply another productivity tool—a faster typewriter, a smarter calculator, a digital intern that requires little more than a subscription fee and a basic acceptable [...]

The question of who owns correctness in an artificial intelligence system is deceptively simple. In traditional software engineering, we have established paradigms for accountability. A backend engineer owns the API contract; a database administrator owns the schema integrity; a frontend developer owns the rendering logic. The lines are drawn, the unit tests are written, and [...]

There’s a peculiar tension that surfaces in almost every AI team I’ve worked with or observed. It usually starts with a seemingly innocuous question: "Is this model working correctly?" What follows is rarely a simple technical check. Instead, it triggers a cascade of ownership disputes that span code, data, business logic, and ultimately, the definition [...]

There's a pervasive myth in the technology sector, a ghost that haunts boardrooms and hiring committees alike: the idea that a sufficiently talented data scientist can conjure a production-ready AI product from raw data and computational power alone. We see the job postings demanding "Python wizardry," "Mastery of PyTorch," and "Expertise in NLP," as if [...]

If you spend enough time around AI product teams, you’ll inevitably hear a certain kind of frustration. It usually starts with a data scientist showing off a model with breathtaking accuracy on a validation set, only for the product manager to ask a simple question: "So, can we ship it next Tuesday?" The silence that [...]

The history of artificial intelligence is often told as a story of algorithms, neural networks, and raw computational power. We celebrate the architects of large language models and the researchers pushing the boundaries of reinforcement learning. Yet, beneath the surface of these headline-grabbing advancements lies a quieter, more foundational discipline that has been the bedrock [...]

When we talk about artificial intelligence, the conversation almost immediately drifts toward the towering achievements of Large Language Models, the uncanny realism of generative image systems, or the race toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). We marvel at the sheer scale of parameters and the terabytes of data digested during training. Yet, beneath the surface of [...]

Every founder I meet seems to be hunting for the same mythical creature: a "full-stack" machine learning engineer who can build state-of-the-art models, deploy them to production, manage cloud infrastructure, and somehow also handle data annotation. They are looking for a unicorn, and frankly, unicorns are rare, expensive, and often allergic to the mundane realities [...]

When people talk about building an AI company, the conversation almost immediately gravitates toward the "hard" technical roles: the machine learning engineers, the research scientists, the backend architects. It’s a natural bias; we tend to view AI through the lens of code and math because those are the tangible levers of capability. But anyone who [...]

It’s a strange thing, watching a brilliant engineering team celebrate a successful model deployment, only to have the entire project jeopardized a week later by a cease-and-desist letter regarding a dataset they scraped two years prior. In the world of artificial intelligence, speed is often mistaken for progress, and the legal landscape is treated as [...]

Most AI teams I know treat legal review like a fire extinguisher: essential, but only considered when something is already burning. They bring in a lawyer when a term sheet is being negotiated, when a user sues, or when a major enterprise client demands a custom data processing agreement that no one on the engineering [...]

We need to talk about the elephant in the server room. For the last two years, the prevailing wisdom in the startup world was simple: move fast, break things, and figure out the ethics later. That approach works when you’re disrupting the photo-sharing market. It works significantly less well when your "disruption" involves a neural [...]

It's a strange paradox we're navigating right now. On one hand, the "move fast and break things" ethos that birthed Silicon Valley is colliding with a global demand for accountability. On the other, the very nature of Artificial Intelligence—its probabilistic, non-deterministic behavior—seems fundamentally incompatible with the rigid, check-box compliance frameworks that govern industries like finance [...]

When regulators talk about "risk-based approaches" to artificial intelligence, they're not just using corporate jargon to sound sophisticated. They're grappling with a fundamental tension: how do you create rules for a technology that can be a medical diagnostic tool in the morning and a video game character in the evening? The answer lies in classification [...]

When we talk about regulating artificial intelligence, the conversation often drifts into abstract philosophy or dystopian fiction. But for the engineers and architects building these systems, regulation is a concrete engineering problem. It’s about compliance matrices, risk assessment protocols, and system boundaries. The European Union’s AI Act, along with emerging frameworks in the US and [...]

Most engineers I know react to the EU AI Act with a specific kind of fatigue. It feels like another layer of compliance bureaucracy, a set of vague legal constraints imposed on systems that are already complex enough. But if we look closely at the text of the regulation—specifically the risk categories outlined in Articles [...]

Most AI systems in production today are built for performance, speed, or cost reduction. They are rarely built for compliance by default. With the EU AI Act now in force, this gap is no longer a minor oversight; it is a structural risk. The Act does not merely regulate data privacy or model bias; it [...]

There's a persistent myth in the startup world, particularly in the AI space, that regulation and speed are mortal enemies. The narrative goes that you build the thing first, get it to market, and then, once you have traction and funding, you deal with the messy business of compliance. It’s treated as a tax on [...]

There’s a peculiar myth that persists in engineering circles, particularly among those building the next generation of intelligent systems: the idea that compliance is a tax on innovation. It’s viewed as a bureaucratic hurdle, a set of guardrails installed after the real work is done, or a necessary evil to appease legal teams before a [...]

It’s a strange feeling to watch a promising project slowly suffocate under the weight of paperwork and legal ambiguity. I’ve seen it happen in server rooms and co-working spaces where brilliant engineers were building things that genuinely excited me—algorithms that could diagnose rare diseases, systems that could optimize energy grids, tools that could help writers [...]

When founders talk about building artificial intelligence, the conversation almost always orbits around compute, data, and talent. Regulatory risk often enters the room late, treated as a compliance checkbox rather than a foundational design constraint. That’s a mistake. In practice, the jurisdictions where AI startups face the earliest and most forceful shutdowns aren’t necessarily the [...]

Building intelligent systems today feels a bit like sailing uncharted waters. You can architect a beautiful vessel, rig the sails perfectly, and harness the wind's power, but you never quite know when you'll hit a regulatory reef or a compliance squall. The landscape of AI legislation is shifting beneath our feet, not as a singular [...]

Every engineer who has ever shipped a model across borders knows the sinking feeling when a legal memo lands in the inbox with the subject line “Compliance Review.” It’s rarely about a missing comma or a forgotten log entry. It’s about a jurisdiction you’ve barely considered suddenly dictating the architecture of your pipeline. As we [...]

Australia and New Zealand are often grouped together in discussions about technology policy, largely due to their close cultural and economic ties. However, when it comes to the governance of Artificial Intelligence, they represent two distinct philosophical approaches that reflect their broader regulatory traditions. While both nations are deeply invested in the potential of AI [...]