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Do Foundation Model Providers Comply with the EU AI Act?

crfm.stanford.edu

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Re: Do Foundation Model Providers Comply with the EU AI Act?

#11

Post by senko »

csmpltn wrote: post #8

Tracking "Energy" for what is otherwise a compressed version of the entire internet at your disposal seems so green-washed and disingenuous. Whatever "Energy" consumption those models have - it's peanuts compared to the alternatives.

It's still an useful metric, why not measure and report it? Especially for models that are being deployed on mobile phones or desktop apps. And looking ahead, the future where IoT devices will have a mini-neural-net is not inconceivable.

One of the lessons from the crypto fiasco is that, if unchecked, the energy requirements can baloon to stratospheric heights.

Re: Do Foundation Model Providers Comply with the EU AI Act?

#12

Post by senko »

gyudin wrote: post #10
RamblingCTO wrote: post #3

I was actually fearing something very stupid coming from the EU, but the requirements/questions asked (if it's only that from the table) are fairly ok!

350 pages of ramblings that nobody who was voting for this act hasn't actually read?

In comparison, the Inflation Reduction Act, an one-off act, is 750 pages long.

Re: Do Foundation Model Providers Comply with the EU AI Act?

#14

Post by gyudin »

zarzavat wrote: post #5

This is as if the EU required Coca Cola to print the recipe on the bottle. They would just stop selling original Coke in the EU rather than disclose that. What is more likely is that OpenAI, Google etc will train EU-specific models for the EU market.

Their goal is probably just to get rid of European competitors and get an advantage. To make sure big enterprises will have time, money and resources to get trough the whole process of compliance.

Re: Do Foundation Model Providers Comply with the EU AI Act?

#15

Post by jonathanstrange »

jdiez17 wrote: post #6
zarzavat wrote: post #5

This is as if the EU required Coca Cola to print the recipe on the bottle. They would just stop selling original Coke in the EU rather than disclose that. What is more likely is that OpenAI, Google etc will train EU-specific models for the EU market.

It's more like requiring Coca-Cola to print which ingredients they put into it.

...and telling them they cannot put real cocaine into it.

Re: Do Foundation Model Providers Comply with the EU AI Act?

#17

Post by hdkrgr »

csmpltn wrote: post #8

Tracking "Energy" for what is otherwise a compressed version of the entire internet at your disposal seems so green-washed and disingenuous. Whatever "Energy" consumption those models have - it's peanuts compared to the alternatives.

I had the chance to talk to a staffer of one of the MEPs leading the political negotiations in EU parlament committee a few weeks ago. His take was that the pro-tech/pro-business parties conceded the 'AI users must track their energy use'-point to the Greens in the latest draft (which is the parliament's counterproposal to earlier drafts by the commission --think EU executive-- and council --think governments of the member states--) because it's so unrealistic in practice that it's likely to be stricken out of the law again during the final negotiation round between parliament and council negotiators.

I really hope that'll be the case. FWIW, I believe companies _should_ be required to keep tabs on their (and their supply chain's) emissions, but demanding that this be done at model/system level by data scientists is just ridiculous.

edit: grammar

Re: Do Foundation Model Providers Comply with the EU AI Act?

#18

Post by Roark66 »

It is important to note acts of EU parliament are just one stage of EU lawmaking and the fact "an act has passed" doesn't make it a law. Once such act has been passed there are many steps EU as well as member states have to take to make it law.

So, this article is very useful, but it really is just an analysis of compliance with _proposed_ law.

For it to become real law EU council has to agree unanimously (made up of prime ministers of all member states). Then each one of 27 countries has to implement the law following it's democratic process (national parliament, president, it has to pass any constitutional challenges if any are made etc). Only then it becomes law.

It is a long tedious process and certain things are apriori excluded from EU's jurisdiction altogether such as state level energy generation, anything that affects security situation and many others. So for decades now EU commission and the Court of justice of EU have been working very hard on "scope creep" of existing laws. It's a bonanza of opportunity for most powerful EU states to squeeze the smaller ones, for powerful external groups to influence whatever they want and so on. Seriously, after the horrible fiasco of Brexit (for EU, as I'm considering it from that perspective), loosing one of the most developed and competitive countries on Earth the EU should really have had a proper reform. There are many reasons why EU couldn't retain UK as a member. Arrogance of the commission, is but one of them. Now from the perspective of many years it is very clear booting UK out (and making it think it was it's own idea) was Franco-German (Russian sponsored) plan from the start.

Re: Do Foundation Model Providers Comply with the EU AI Act?

#19

Post by gyudin »

senko wrote: post #12
gyudin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

350 pages of ramblings that nobody who was voting for this act hasn't actually read?

In comparison, the Inflation Reduction Act, an one-off act, is 750 pages long.

“If you don't want them to know something, put it in a book, they'll never read it” Idea as an old as the world itself :)

Re: Do Foundation Model Providers Comply with the EU AI Act?

#20

Post by hdkrgr »

senko wrote: post #11
csmpltn wrote: post #8

Tracking "Energy" for what is otherwise a compressed version of the entire internet at your disposal seems so green-washed and disingenuous. Whatever "Energy" consumption those models have - it's peanuts compared to the alternatives.

It's still an useful metric, why not measure and report it? Especially for models that are being deployed on mobile phones or desktop apps. And looking ahead, the future where IoT devices will have a mini-neural-net is not inconceivable. One of the lessons from the crypto fiasco is that, if unchecked, the energy requirements can baloon to stratospheric heights.

I do think this will be a useful metric, and it seems obvious that the hyperscalers will have a feature helping you keep track of energy use and emissions of the resources you rented. But why demand this on the level of an individual model/product? For these foundation models, I think it's reasonable to assume they will all be trained on hyperscaler-provided gpu-clusters, so there'll likely be an off-the-shelf funcitonality by AWS/Azure/GCP to report this number, but the draft of the EU AI Act also demands tracking energy use for other 'high-risk' AI systems which companies may plausibly train and/or deploy on-prem. Good luck tracking the per-token energy use of your model that's running on some on-prem server on last-gen GPUs.
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