Meta says it won't sign Europe AI agreement

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.

These 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.

Also EU Users will try to use the better AI products with e.g. a VPN to the US.

Most won't. Remember that this is an issue almost noone (outside a certain bubble) is aware of.

Haha, huge, HUGE L-take. Go to any library or coffeeshop, and you'll see most students on their laptops are on ChatGPT. Do you think they won't immediately figure out how to use a VPN to move to the "better" models from the US or China if the EU regulations cripple the ones available in the EU?

EU's preemptive war on AI will be like the RIAA's war on music piracy. EU consumers will get their digital stuff one way or another, only EU's domestic products will just fall behind by not competing to create a equally good product that the consumers want.

> Do you think they won't immediately figure out how to use a VPN to move to the "better" models

I think they don't even know the term "model" (in AI context), let alone which one's the best. They only know ChatGPT.

I do think it's possible that stories spread like "the new cool ChatGPT update is US-only: Here's how to access it in the EU".

However I don't think many will make use of that.

Anecdotally, most people around me (even CS colleagues) only use the standard model, ChatGPT 4o, and don't even take a look at the other options.

Additionally, AI companies could quickly get in trouble if they accept payments from EU credit cards.