alt Hacker NewsMeta says it won’t sign Europe AI agreement, calling it an overreach
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EU regulations are sometimes able to bully the world into compliance (eg. cookies).
Usually minorities are able to impose "wins" on a majority when the price of compliance is lower than the price of defiance.
This is not the case with AI. The stakes are enormous. AI is full steam ahead and no one is getting in the way short of nuclear war.
I admit that I am biased enough to immediately expect the AI agreement to be exactly what we need right now if this is how Meta reacts to it. Which I know is stupid because I genuinely have no idea what is in it.
There’s a summary of the guidelines here for anyone who is wondering:
https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/introduction-to-code-of...
It’s certainly onerous. I don’t see how it helps anyone except for big copyright holders, lawyers and bureaucrats.
EU is going to add popups to all the LLMs like they did all the websites. :(
I'm surprised that most of the comments here are siding with Europe blindly?
Am I the only one who assumes by default that European regulation will be heavy-handed and ill conceived?
Meta knows all there is about overreach and of course they don’t want that stunted.
Presumably it is Meta's growth they have in mind.
Edit: from the linked in post, Meta is concerned about the growth of European companies:
"We share concerns raised by these businesses that this over-reach will throttle the development and deployment of frontier AI models in Europe, and stunt European companies looking to build businesses on top of them."
Kaplan's LinkedIn post says absolutely nothing about what is objectionable about the policy. I'm inclined to think "growth-stunting" could mean anything as tame as mandating user opt-in for new features as opposed to the "opt-out" that's popular among US companies.
Nit: (possibly cnbc's fault) there should be a hyphen to clarify meta opposes overreach, not growth. "growth-stunting overreach" vs "growth (stunting overreach)"
I hope this isn't coming down to an argument of "AI can't advance if there are rules". Things like copyright, protection of the sources of information, etc.
Why does meta need to sign anything? I thought the EU made laws that anyone operating in the EU including meta had to comply to.
Good. As Elon says, the only thing the EU does export is regulation. Same geniuses that make us click 5 cookie pop-ups every webpage
As a citizen I’m perfectly happy with the AI Act. As a “person in tech”, the kind of growth being “stunt” here shouldn’t be happening in the first place. It’s not overreach to put some guardrails and protect humans from the overreaching ideas of the techbro elite.
> It aims to improve transparency and safety surrounding the technology
Really it does, especially with some technology run by so few which is changing things so fast..
> Meta says it won’t sign Europe AI agreement, calling it an overreach that will stunt growth
God forbid critical things and impactful tech like this be created with a measured head, instead of this nonsense mantra of "Move fast and break things"
Id really prefer NOT to break at least what semblance of society social media hasn't already broken.
Meta on the warpath, Europe falls further behind. Unless you're ready for a fight, don't get in the way of a barbarian when he's got his battle paint on.
The US, China and others are sprinting and thus spiraling towards the majority of society's destitution unless we force these billionaires hands; figure out how we will eat and sustain our economies where one person is now doing a white or blue (Amazon warehouse robots) collar job that ten use to do.
I have a strong aversion to Meta and Zuck but EU is pretty tone-deaf. Everything they do reeks of political and anti-American tech undertone.
The more I read of the existing rule sets within the eurozone the less surprised I am that they make additional shit tier acts like this.
What do surprise me is anything at all working with the existing rulesets, Effectively no one have technical competence and the main purpose of legislation seems to add mostly meaningless but parentally formulated complexities in order to justify hiring more bureaucrats.
>How to live in Europe >1. Have a job that does not need state approval or licensing. >2. Ignore all laws, they are too verbose and too technically complex to enforce properly anyway.
Just like GDPR, it will tremendously benefit big corporations (even if Meta is resistant) and those who are happy NOT to follow regulations (which is a lot of Chinese startups).
And consumers will bear the brunt.
the Meta that uses advertising tooling for propaganda and elected trump?
Not just Meta, 40 EU companies urged EU to postpone roll out of the ai act by two years due to it's unclear nature. This code of practice is voluntary and goes beyond what is in the act itself. EU published it in a way to say that there would be less scrutiny if you voluntarily sign up for this code of practice. Meta would anyway face scrutiny on all ends, so does not seem to a plausible case to sign something voluntary.
One of the key aspects of the act is how a model provider is responsible if the downstream partners misuse it in any way. For open source, it's a very hard requirement[1].
> GPAI model providers need to establish reasonable copyright measures to mitigate the risk that a downstream system or application into which a model is integrated generates copyright-infringing outputs, including through avoiding overfitting of their GPAI model. Where a GPAI model is provided to another entity, providers are encouraged to make the conclusion or validity of the contractual provision of the model dependent upon a promise of that entity to take appropriate measures to avoid the repeated generation of output that is identical or recognisably similar to protected works.
[1] https://www.lw.com/en/insights/2024/11/european-commission-r...