Hello there, welcome back. I'm James Panicki. This is MLEX's weekly podcast covering the world of

regulatory affairs, as only MLEX reporters reporters can do and in around ten minutes

from now we'll be talking about automated vehicles in the United Kingdom

consumers are embracing the new technology but regulators are now at a fork in

the motorway struggling to keep up with recent advances and at risk of

relegating the country to playing catch-up.

So stick around for that if you can.

But first, an extraordinary legal clash unfolding in California.

It has been two years since Facebook was accused of illegally copying the world's largest repository

of digitised and realistic three-dimension

objects and scenes, objects and scenes over which a Lithuanian startup is claiming ownership.

At the time, the allegations appeared highly unlikely.

Why would a social media platform need digitised objects? But now Facebook's parent company has

rebranded as meta platforms and has launched a bold vision of enhanced reality called the

Metaverse. And wouldn't you know it, the allegations are now starting to take on a very different

meaning. So much to talk about here today. Mike Swift,

of course, is MX's chief global digital risk correspondent. He works out of our San Francisco

offices, and he joins me now. So, Mike, let's start from a very basic question. What is computer

vision and why is teaching computers how to see, in quotes?

Why is that so difficult? Sure. So it's a very simple thing for humans and animals even. If I hold up

the bin where we keep our cat food for our cat, she instantly recognizes what it is, and it's not very complicated.

But for a computer, you basically need to translate a string of pixels and numbers,

...