This would be unfortunately a rather nuclear option due to the continent’s insane reliance on technology that breaks its unenforced laws.
This would be unfortunately a rather nuclear option due to the continent’s insane reliance on technology that breaks its unenforced laws.
How about not making these unenforced laws in the first place so that European companies could actually have a chance at competing? We're going to suffer the externalities of AI either way, but at least there would be a chance that a European company could be relevant.
The AI Act absolutely befuddled me. How could you release relatively strict regulation for a technology that isn't really being used yet and is in the early stages of development? How did they not foresee this kneecapping AI investment and development in Europe? If I were a tinfoil hat wearer I'd probably say that this was intentional sabotage, because this was such an obvious consequence.
Mistral is great, but they haven't kept up with Qwen (at least with Mistral Small 4). Leanstral seems interesting, so we'll have to see how it does.
Because the AI act was mostly written to address issues with ML products and services. It was mostly done before ChatGPT happened, so all the foundation model stuff got shoehorned in.
Speaking as someone who's been doing stats and ML for a while now, the AI act is pretty good. The compliance burden falls mostly on the companies big enough to handle it.
The foundation model parts are stupid though.
>Because the AI act was mostly written to address issues with ML products and services. It was mostly done before ChatGPT happened, so all the foundation model stuff got shoehorned in.
It's not an excuse. Anybody with half a working brain should've been able to tell that this was going to happen. You can't regulate a field in its infancy and expect it to ever function.
>The compliance burden falls mostly on the companies big enough to handle it.
You mean it falls on anyone that tries to compete with a model. There's a random 10^25 FLOPS compute rule in there. The B300 does 2500-3750 TFLOPS at fp16. 200 of these can hit that compute number in 6 months, which means that in a few years time pretty much every model is going to hit that.
And if somebody figures out fp8 training then it would only take 10 of these GPUs to hit it in 6 months.
The copyright rule and having to disclose what was trained on also means that it will be impossible to have enough training data for an EU model. And this even applies to people that make the model free and open weights.
I don't see how it is possible for any European AI model to compete. Even if these restrictions were lifted it would still push away investors because of the increased risk of stupid regulation.