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The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

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Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#141
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effect is going to be that all the innovation happens elsewhere, big AI companies will develop outside Europe. And Europeans will only get to benefit as consumers, not as makers of AI. And the EU will take that as a reason to regulate even harder and then also somehow end up giving a bunch of money to its telcos. EDIT: My point is that regulation doesn’t just prevent “bad products”. The compliance overhead also p…

Would you say the same things about FDA regulations? As a programmer who used to work on medical devices, these sound pretty similar like the FDA regulations we dealt with. The goal isn't to stifle innovation, it's to keep scammers and crooks out of the market and make things better for everyone. The EU doesn't want another Thalidomide, and the US shouldn't want another Theranos.

I am not calling to abolish all regulation.

But please consider this:

How many people’s lives could have been saved if FDA regulations didn’t make medical approvals take 10 years? How many life-saving medications could have been invented if the cost of approval didn’t limit innovation to the biggest companies?

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#142

The acceleration of the divergence of the EU from the United States with respect to cutting edge software will be a site to behold. One is neutering and the other is cultivating.

As a EU citizen, I can't even begin to explain to you how willing I am to trade in possibly not having cutting edge software for the higher living standards and cultural superiority of the EU.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big companies can afford regulations. They will do just fine with writing all the compliance documents But Small companies can’t afford the compliance overhead. And big companies can only develop out of small companies. So they will develop elsewhere

They said the same about GDPR and is working fine. If a company crosses me I just request data removal and call it a day. It's all good. I do hate GDPR popups tho.

Yeah, and now where is the privacy respecting European tech giant? Europe has fallen farther and farther behind in tech, every single year, and are now completely crushingly behind in AI. Like the only (continential) European AI company I know of is DeepL, and DeepL will soon be in DeepSh-t if GPT-4 costs go down.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#144

I don't why bard isn't coming to the EU. Is it this or something else. Google hasn't explained it. I would hope that any ai act will allow reasonable players like Openai, Microsoft and Google to continue their good work without ruining into too much red tape. Considering what is happening, if it's because of the ai act, the act might be too strict as the EU risks getting disadvantaged by not having access to the same…

Under what criteria did you reach the conclusion that OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are reasonable players in all of this? Is it purely based on their name recognition? Is that not antithetical to the idea of a competitive market?

Also, there aren't 180 countries in the world that are outside of EU.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It propably is, based on how many of those small, VC backed start-ups, complain about, I don't know, the burden of properly declaring taxes, paying social security for their properly registered employees and so on.

How many do complain about that?

In Germany? A lot, apparently a RSU or ESOP program is to hard to set-up, paying higher base salaries out of the question, so they complain about zheir inability to allow their "worker" participate on the company "success", mostly as a diversion from the fact that they just don't want to. Or taxes, something impossible to do for a new, academic / SW engineer led start-up to do in Germany. It is so bad, if you delieve people, that for that reason alone companies move abroad. All BS of course, given howany small businesses without the reasources of a VC backed start-up, actually manage to do so day in day out. The list goes on...

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#146

The acceleration of the divergence of the EU from the United States with respect to cutting edge software will be a site to behold. One is neutering and the other is cultivating.

Same for GDPR. Not a surprise all big tech is in US. If EU wants to play this card, US will get even stronger at keeping tech talent. (I reside neither in the US or EU)

> US will get even stronger at keeping tech talent

Not necessarily the case. There's many reasons someone would leave the US (or North America in general) for the EU/EEA. The US is becoming less attractive to some given the current political weirdness. There's plenty of interesting work to be done in the EU and EEA that's not "hindered" by GDPR, and many developers who relocate to the EEA actually _like_ GDPR, and regulation aimed towards protecting individual rights. That, at least, is the case for me. Having had the opportunity to relocate anywhere, I ultimately picked the EEA.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please clarify: is your position that software is not capable of doing harm?

Yes, most software is harmless. There are some scenarios where it could do harm, but ultimately said harm was the product of human usage of the software, not software inherently. There are a few examples such as medical device software and things like train software where honest mistakes can result in human harm. However even with those the issue was that humans made the mistakes. Software development as a discipline…

Replace "software" with "guns" in your post and it's the same effect.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#148
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like (yet another) extension of copyright. Whilst I'm not sure I completely disagree with you, I want people to acknowledge that copyright is not the natural state of the universe. Prior to (I think) 1790 there was no copyright and human beings managed minor things like, you know, the renaissance and stuff like that. Copyright was invented and enforced and the results have been a mixed bag. It seems to suf…

> it's about the net benefit to society and we should be very careful what we wish for. Seems like we have a classic trolly problem. On one track, compensating copyright holders is required for LLMs, and it's going to be very expensive to acquire all of this copyrighted info, meaning only the biggest companies can afford to do it. On the other track, compensating copyright holders is not required, LLMs (led by big te…

> On one track, compensating copyright holders is required for LLMs, and it's going to be very expensive to acquire all of this copyrighted info, meaning only the biggest companies can afford to do it.

There is also the third track which is that most abundant code is open source or unlicensed content (which is protected in the US afaik). If corporations can't monetize on it, we win, because models either need to be open source or we need payment for training.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for GDPR. Not a surprise all big tech is in US. If EU wants to play this card, US will get even stronger at keeping tech talent. (I reside neither in the US or EU)

I didn't see any effect from GDPR on tech talent migration. Any source on this?!

This, to me, sounds like personal opinion. Many developers in the EEA, while agreeing that it causes extra work, like the spirit of GDPR. The attitude (a generalisation) towards the American way of working with private data, is generally that it's unethical. It's not hard to find developers who are happy to, and want to, work within the framework.

Re: The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you need patents and those patents will be created and registered in the US or China this way. Kind of like how EU car manufacturers have been sleeping on the EV movement. Now they have to source their parts from Chinese manufacturers. So wealth is leaking(patent costs etc) out of Europe and the continent will have less wealth in total over time. Especially now that the cheap Russian energy they had access too i…

Wouldn’t those patents be for things the EU sees as unethical anyway, and therefore something they shouldn’t build? Or do you mean the rest of the world might use these unethical, super-villainy means to discover and patent totally normal things that they might want to use in the EU as well? > Kind of like how EU car manufacturers have been sleeping on the EV movement. Now they have to source their parts from Chinese…

> Kind of like how EU car manufacturers have been sleeping on the EV movement. Now they have to source their parts from Chinese manufacturers.

That's a meme and not true at all. Well, of course a lot of European car makers source from China. As does everyone, everywhere, else.

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