Welcome to the Thomson Reuters Labs Blog
Our Medium Home Rebrand, AKA Hello from Labs!
Driving Innovation with AI and Emerging Technology
Hello readers. Welcome to the Thomson Reuters Labs blog! Thomson Reuters Labs aims to be the leading force in AI innovation across all industries served by TR, creating a world where AI not only informs the way forward but drives it, transforming the way people access and utilize information, and ultimately, fostering a more informed, efficient, and just society. This blog has been around for a while, but we’re refreshing our focus expanding the range of topics we cover from machine learning, and other computer science topics to very specific applied innovation topics that Labs is spearheading on behalf of our business and customers. We truly are at the forefront — not just of cutting-edge AI research, but also in the application of it to real world, high value enterprise problems. There are few companies in the world who have released as much AI powered products to the market as we have, and we’re here to tell our story to the world.
There’s Plenty to Talk About
We are particularly interested in talking more about our how we are creating AI-based capabilities in our products. The explosion in generative AI technology has drastically accelerated our ability to solve our customers’ most challenging problems. And indeed AI has accelerated development for many software companies; but as a trust business, we have a particular interest in not just developing at pace, but doing so in a way that earns and maintains the trust and truthfulness that our brand has been known for so many decades. We think there are a lot of good stories to share in this space and Labs has a unique perspective being at the heart of the AI in these capabilities. We are limited only by the amount of time we have in a day.
For example, we released the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based question answering system in Thomson Reuters’ first generative AI assistant — Westlaw’s AI-Assisted Research, released last November. This was followed up with Ask Practical Law AI in January of this year and Checkpoint Edge with CoCounsel just last month. And many more solutions are on the way!
While our product innovation continues to accelerate, we are actively exploring how our unique competitive advantage of 150 years of world class content and subject matter expertise can be incorporated into generative AI — through domain adaption of language models, large and small, and other techniques. We recently shared our journey of scaling LLM customization through continuous pretraining and instruction finetuning of open source LLMs at the 2024 AWS London Summit. (Follow this blog for a post about that soon!) And more results of that research will be shared over the coming months.
Why are we Doing This?
Labs has been at the heart of much of Thomson Reuters innovation over the past 30 years. What started out as a handful of people in the early 1990s focused on applied AI in the legal domain, has expanded into a team of ~170 applied scientists and research engineers focused on all segments of Thomson Reuters’ business.
So we have plenty to talk about, but why put in the time and effort to share here? Thomson Reuters is a technology company, but we often fly under the radar — we don’t talk enough about the great work we do and the hard problems we solve. We truly are a world class AI company in the enterprise space, where it is traditionally extremely challenging to deliver and drive AI adoption. We have a great story to tell, and we could benefit from joining in the global dialog about developing and applying technology to solve real world problems. We hope this will generate some healthy discussion in science, engineering, and even business areas. Perhaps we can learn from each other’s experiences. And, lets be honest, it will help our brand as a technology company — to continue to attract the word class people needed to further progress our mission.
Shameless Plug: Labs is actively hiring so check out our careers page. If you like the content you see here, you might like to come work for us!
Follow Us!
Where to go from here? Please consider following us here and on our LinkedIn Group and join in on the conversation! Look for us to increase our volume of content over the coming months. Curious about specific areas of our work, what its like to work in applied R&D, or something else? Let us know in the comments. We’re building a backlog of story ideas.
