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Meta says it won't sign Europe AI agreement

(www.cnbc.com)
313 points rntn | 2 comments | 18 Jul 25 17:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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ankit219 ◴[18 Jul 25 19:13 UTC] No.44608660[source]▶
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...

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dmix ◴[18 Jul 25 22:41 UTC] No.44610592[source]▶
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.
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remram ◴[18 Jul 25 22:53 UTC] No.44610676[source]▶
The whole point of regulating it is to shape what it will look like in a couple of years.
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olalonde ◴[18 Jul 25 23:27 UTC] No.44610961[source]▶
You're both right, and that's exactly how early regulation often ends up stifling innovation. Trying to shape a market too soon tends to lock in assumptions that later prove wrong.
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TFYS ◴[19 Jul 25 07:00 UTC] No.44613233[source]▶
Sometimes you can't reverse the damage and societal change after the market has already been created and shaped. Look at fossil fuels, plastic, social media, etc. We're now dependent on things that cause us harm, the damage done is irreversible and regulation is no longer possible because these innovations are now embedded in the foundations of modern society.

Innovation is good, but there's no need to go as fast as possible. We can be careful about things and study the effects more deeply before unleashing life changing technologies into the world. Now we're seeing the internet get destroyed by LLMs because a few people decided it was ok to do so. The benefits of this are not even clear yet, but we're still doing it just because we can. It's like driving a car at full speed into a corner just to see what's behind it.

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FirmwareBurner ◴[19 Jul 25 11:28 UTC] No.44614574[source]▶
> Look at fossil fuels

WHAT?! Do you think we as humanity would have gotten to all the modern inventions we have today like the internet, space travel, atomic energy, if we had skipped the fossil fuel era by preemptively regulating it?

How do you imagine that? Unless you invent a time machine, go to the past, and give inventors schematics of modern tech achievable without fossil fuels.

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TFYS ◴[19 Jul 25 11:56 UTC] No.44614759[source]▶
Maybe not as fast as we did, but eventually we would have. Maybe more research would have been put into other forms of energy if the effects of fossil fuels were considered more thoroughly and usage was limited to a degree that didn't have a chance cause such fast climate change. And so what if the rate of progress would have been slower and we'd be 50 years behind current tech? At least we wouldn't have to worry about all the damage we've caused now, and the costs associated with that. Due to that damage our future progress might halt while a slower, more careful society would continue advancing far into the future.
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1. rpdillon ◴[19 Jul 25 15:54 UTC] No.44616563{3}[source]▶
I think it's an open question whether we can reboot society without the use of fossil fuels. I'm personally of the opinion that we wouldn't be able to.

Simply taking away some giant precursor for the advancements we enjoy today and then assuming it all would have worked out somehow is a bit naive.

I would need to see a very detailed pipeline from growing wheat in an agrarian society to the development of a microprocessor without fossil fuels to understand the point you're making. The mining, the transport, the manufacture, the packaging, the incredible number of supply chains, and the ability to give people time to spend on jobs like that rather than trying to grow their own food are all major barriers I see to the scenario you're suggesting.

The whole other aspect of this discussion that I think is not being explored is that technology is fundamentally competitive, and so it's very difficult to control the rate at which technology advances because we do not have a global government (and if we did have a global government, we'd have even more problems than we do now). As a comment I read yesterday said, technology concentrates gains towards those who can deploy it. And so there's going to be competition to deploy new technologies. Country-level regulation that tries to prevent this locally is only going to lead to other countries gaining the lead.

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2. TFYS ◴[19 Jul 25 18:17 UTC] No.44617944[source]▶
You might be right, but I'm wasn't saying we should ban all use of any technology that has any negative effects, but that we should at least try to understand all the effects before taking it into use, and try to avoid the worst outcomes by regulating how to use the tech. If it turns out that fossil fuels are the only way to achieve modern technology then we should decide to take the risk of the negative effects knowing that there's such a risk. We shouldn't just blindly rush into any direction that might give us some benefit.

Regarding competition, yes you're right. Effective regulation is impossible before we learn global co-operation, and that's probably never going to happen.