alt Hacker NewsThese regulations may end up creating a trap for European companies.
Essentially, the goal is to establish a series of thresholds that result in significantly more complex and onerous compliance requirements, for example when a model is trained past a certain scale.
Burgeoning EU companies would be reluctant to cross any one of those thresholds and have to deal with sharply increased regulatory risks.
On the other hand, large corporations in the US or China are currently benefiting from a Darwinian ecosystem at home that allows them to evolve their frontier models at breakneck speed.
Those non-EU companies will then be able to enter the EU market with far more polished AI-based products and far deeper pockets to face any regulations.
Replies
And then they'll get fined a few billion anyway to cover the gap for no European tech to tax.
It's always the same argument, and it is true. The US retained an edge over the rest of the world through deregulating tech.
My issue with this is that it doesn't look like America's laissez-faire stance on this issues helped Americans much. Internet companies have gotten absolutely humongous and gave rise to a new class of techno-oligarchs that are now funding anti-democracy campaigns.
I feel like getting slightly less performant models is a fair price to pay for increased scrutiny over these powerful private actors.
Also EU Users will try to use the better AI products with e.g. a VPN to the US.