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Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

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Re: Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

#121
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU productivity is already lagging its peers. Being locked out of having the most cutting edge technologies will further plunge the block into a productivity decay. Less productivity means everyone in Europe will get poorer, with declining living standards. This is not an outcome Europe can afford, especially considering its aging workforce. There is no silver lining to this. The EU has to stop strangling its most pr…

> EU productivity is already lagging its peers Source! > Less productivity means everyone in Europe will get poorer, with declining living standards We have some of the highest living standards in the world. In caparison to the U.S.A. in particular, it's like a utopia. > There is no silver lining to this. The EU has to stop strangling its most productive industries with onerous regulations, and allow markets the free…

> We have some of the highest living standards in the world. In caparison to the U.S.A. in particular, it's like a utopia.

Give it a few more decades of compounding lagging productivity, and that will no longer be true.

> The silver lining is American cultural imperialism is ended in Europe, and we live how we want to over here. There are different ways of living, with different values.

Productivity has nothing to do with cultural imperialism. China has dramatically increased their productivity, and that story has nothing to do with American imperialism

Re: Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

#122

This was expected, multinationals have always offered a china specific product. Now there are 3 primary markets/product groupings. China, The US and the EU.

I want the EU "product grouping" in the US; how do I sign up?

You emigrate to the EU, pay taxes in your host country and visit the US sometimes.

Re: Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The EU has shown that they will regulate things years later and impose massive fines and business costs. If that makes the EU look bad, imagine how goddamn incompetent the US regulators look right now.

It has nothing to do with the US. EU regulations are simultaneously unclear and very aggressive. There is significant business risk to operating there as a multi-national. It’s becoming a region that is profitable enough to exist in but not to invest in and Apple is declining the regulatory risk of introducing AI there. Some companies will go for it. Apple is too risk averse. Simple as that.

> It’s becoming a region that is profitable enough to exist in but not to invest in

Then so be it. If Europe's market collapses under the weight of it's own regulation, it's not Apple's fault. Except, Europe's market isn't collapsing and in fact leading multiple nations in drafting similar legislation. If forcing Apple to compete makes their risk forecast worse, reciprocally, that's not the EU's concern or problem. It might just reward the innovation and smart consumer-first design Apple has been avoiding recently.

If you think these laws are "unclear" then you must be in abject denial of what it's purpose is. It's called the "Digital Markets Act". There is a single company that these crosshairs are aimed at, and Apple wants to whine and say it's not fair that a municipal government caught their profiteering racket. Poor thing! What if trillion-dollar Apple decides they can't invest in Europe's future!

Scaremongering. The EU isn't inherently righteous, but their lack of connection to Apple's tax dollars made it very easy to call out Apple's hypocrisy. All Apple can do is whine, and pretend like they weren't illegally abusing Europe's market. I say pretend, because Apple knew full-well that what they were doing was wrong, and now invests inordinate amounts of money marketing, lawyering and lobbying their way out of it.

Re: Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple announced many of the new features are not on-device. There are three categories: 1. On device 2. Private cloud compute (aka Apple’s servers) 3. OpenAI (but only if you approve each time it’s used) This isn’t really a new thing - you could always tell that some of Apple’s AI features depending on remote servers by disconnecting from the internet, using Siri and seeing how much of it stopped working.

2 I guess you can argue; they say that's all encrypted and they're sharing the OS with security researchers to audit. 3 I don't think is applicable, OpenAI is not getting screenshots for awareness, they're just getting "I asked Siri 'write a limerick about the DMA,' Siri can't do that, can you do that?"

I find (2) to be kind of a BS narrative. It’s not like they are open-sourcing the code. All big tech companies have security audit programs. Does that assuage your security concerns when Google, Meta, etc do it? Basically, what they are saying is they are doing it on the backend and you should give them credit for doing it on the frontend because some security researchers are going to get a Disneyland tour.

Personally, I actually am somewhat encouraged that tech companies are subject to legal process (in the form of lawsuit discovery etc). Tech companies have paid billion-dollar settlements for allegedly breaking the laws in segments of their business that don’t generate billions in profits. Obviously there’s a lot of room for them to push the limits of the law, disagreement about what the law is, and there mays be ways for them to get away with things. But the fact that audits are happening, the code and logs can end up in court acts as some kind of constraint on their behavior.

Re: Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do people survive with Linux and Windows.

Do you call being hacked with ransomware "surviving"? Or being part of a nefarious botnet "surviving"? Or accidentally installing keyloggers "surviving"?

Given that all three of those things are documented and present threats to Windows and MacOS (as well as iOS and Android), I guess so. Those users seem to "surivive" fine.

Re: Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am happy to make the decisions myself than have some random tech company decide on my behalf.

OK great, but getting hacked by ransomware still isn't what I'd call "surviving". It's a matter of tradeoffs. In exchange for making more security decisions for yourself, you wind up with a much higher risk of losing your data and privacy. So it's important to acknowledge what you're giving up as well. And Apple isn't exactly a "random tech company". It's currently literally the third largest company in the world [1]…

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Re: Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are legitimate concerns for user privacy with any third-party integration, including OpenAI which is why Apple asks you before sending a request to ChatGPT. They solved this problem already, and I guess they want to try and hold EU users over a barrel by claiming interoperability is impossible or something. Seriously, what kind of fearmongering can Apple push that doesn't make you side-eye the OpenAI integratio…

> There are legitimate concerns for user privacy with any third-party integration, including OpenAI which is why Apple asks you before sending a request to ChatGPT Right - which is why the ChatGPT integration is such a small part of the total Ai/LLM capabilities they announced, and they've loudly and publicly announced that it will support other 3rd parties in the future. Buuuuut - what happens if/when the EU decides…

> and they've loudly and publicly announced that it will support other 3rd parties in the future.

Then I don't see why people are defending the opposite statement, preemptively.

> Buuuuut - what happens if/when the EU decides the DMA requires Apple to open up their Private Cloud and on-device models to 3rd party replacement?

Literally nothing bad? If Apple implements all of these third-party models the same as their first-party ones, I think that would be awesome. People could replace Siri with Mistral and start getting useful results back instead of the same canned responses.

Re: Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

#128

> “We are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security,” Apple said in a statement. Apart from the “security concerns” of allowing use of non Apple services it will be interesting to hear the specifics of these. I thought most AI features were being released in American English before other local…

It's pretty easy to see where they're coming from.

Apple's approach to AI integration draws a pretty clear line between the part that Apple controls and takes credit/blame for privacy of (i.e. on-device models and their private cloud system) and third-parties that require specific consent to send data to (ChatGPT).

If the EU decided that Apple has to allow their whole on-device and private cloud stack to be warning-less-ly swapped out for PII_GrabberGPT, NüdLeaker Pro, or ScamBot9000 if the user chooses it from a legally required randomized menu, then I can see why they would have rational concerns about user privacy.

Re: Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

#129
post #94
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and EU regulations have teeth As someone who has been involved in this journey from the beginning, essentially starting from a point akin to "fuck the EU, they're laughably ignorable" it's really interesting to read this sentence. We can work with that.

> essentially starting from a point akin to "fuck the EU, they're laughably ignorable" it's really interesting to read this sentence If you don't have a physical presence within the EU, you can and probably should ignore their laws/regulations. There's very little if anything they can do to you. This includes GDPR and other "viral" laws. EU citizens seem to believe their laws apply around the world - they do not. If…

> both good and bad

Not arguing against that. The first thing is to be able to steer. And then you can steer in the right direction. So I'm glad it seems we'll finally be able to steer. Now we can figure out where exactly we want to end up.

Re: Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

#130
post #3

Heh. The spite wars continue. I’m sure this will earn you a lot of favor, Apple.

Their new slate of ai products will be able to have screen reading capabilities. There are legitimate concerns for user privacy here. Their agreement with OpenAI is likely very strict.

They dealt with this for third-party keyboards by barring them from connecting to the internet, they could do something similar to replacement on-device models. Even if that meant the "ask chatgpt" option wouldn't be available in the EU.

I think they're more motivated by trying to scaremonger about the DMA, in much the same way they and others did about GDPR.

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