Meta says it won't sign Europe AI agreement

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...

Lovely when they try to regulate a burgeoning market before we have any idea what the market is going to look like in a couple years.

The whole point of regulating it is to shape what it will look like in a couple of years.

Regulators often barely grasp how current markets function and they are supposed to be futurists now too? Government regulatory interests almost always end up lining up with protecting entrenched interests, so it's essentially asking for a slow moving group of the same mega companies. Which is very much what Europes market looks like today. Stasis and shifting to a stagnating middle.

> Which is very much what Europes market looks like today. Stasis and shifting to a stagnating middle.

Preferable to a burgeoning oligarchy.

No, that... that's exactly what we have today. An oligarchy persists through captured state regulation. A more free market would have a constantly changing top.

Historically, freer markets have lead to monopolies. It's why we have antitrust regulations in the first place (now if only they were enforced...)

Depends on the time horizon you look at. A completely unregulated market usually ends up dominated by monopolists… who last a generation or two and then are usurped and become declining oligarchs. True all the way back to the Medici.

In a rigidly regulated market with preemptive action by regulators (like EU, Japan) you end up with a persistent oligarchy that is never replaced. An aristocracy of sorts.

The middle road is the best. Set up a fair playing field and rules of the game, but allow innovation to happen unhindered, until the dust has settled. There should be regulation, but the rules must be bought with blood. The risk of premature regulation is worse.

> There should be regulation, but the rules must be bought with blood.

That's an awfully callous approach, and displays a disturbing lack of empathy toward other people.