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.

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.

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.

I think it’s one of those “everyone knows” things that plastic and social media are bad, but I think the world without them is way, way worse. People focus on these popular narratives but if people thought social media was bad, they wouldn’t use it.

Personally, I don’t think they’re bad. Plastic isn’t that harmful, and neither is social media.

I think people romanticize the past and status quo. Change is scary, so when things change and the world is bad, it is easy to point at anything that changed and say “see, the change is what did it!”

People don't use things that they know are bad, but someone who has grown up in an environment where everyone uses social media for example, can't know that it's bad because they can't experience the alternative anymore. We don't know the effects all the accumulating plastic has on our bodies. The positive effects of these things can be bigger than the negative ones, but we can't know that because we're not even trying to figure it out. Sometimes it might be impossible to find out all the effects before large scale adoption, but still we should at least try. Currently the only study we do before deciding is the one to figure out if it'll make a profit for the owner.

> We don't know the effects all the accumulating plastic has on our bodies.

This is handwaving. We can be pretty well sure at this point what the effects aren’t, given their widespread prevalence for generations. We have a 2+ billion sample size.

No, we can't be sure. There's a lot of diseases that we don't know the cause of, for example. Cancers, dementia, Alzheimer's, etc. There is a possibility that the rates of those diseases are higher because of plastics. Plastic pollution also accumulates, there was a lot less plastic in the environment a few decades ago. We add more faster than it gets removed, and there could be some threshold after which it becomes more of an issue. We might see the effect a few decades from now. Not only on humans, but it's everywhere in the environment now, affecting all life on earth.

You're not arguing in a way that strikes me as intellectually honest.

You're hypothesizing the existence of large negative effects with minimal evidence.

But the positive effects of plastics and social media are extremely well understood and documented. Plastics have revolutionized practically every industry we have.

With that kind of pattern of evidence, I think it makes sense to discount the negatives and be sure to account for all the positives before saying that deploying the technology was a bad idea.