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Do Foundation Model Providers Comply with the EU AI Act?

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21–30 of 75 posts

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

#21
post #18

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…

This is an Act, it won't be nationally implemented but is applicable directly in EU states.

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

#22

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!

It's notable that Hugging Face's BLOOM (https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom) might already be compliant (ignoring the 'member states' requirement which I'm sure they could comply with easily enough, it's about disclosing EU member where the model is on the market, so them simply listing all EU countries in a doc somewhere may suffice).

Some may be tempted to point at the lower scores of OpenAI, Google and Facebook models and say this means the regulations aren't fit for purpose, though of course you can take the view this means OpenAI, Google and Facebook aren't doing a good enough job of how they train and publish data about their models.

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

#23
post #21
post #18

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…

This is an Act, it won't be nationally implemented but is applicable directly in EU states.

"Acts" don't exist in EU law. You either have Regulations (which become law after being approved) and Directives (which member states are bound to implement in their own legislation). "EU Acts" are just the new BS PR way to add yet another level of abstraction to European politics.

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

#24

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!

It's notable that Hugging Face's BLOOM ( https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom ) might already be compliant (ignoring the 'member states' requirement which I'm sure they could comply with easily enough, it's about disclosing EU member where the model is on the market, so them simply listing all EU countries in a doc somewhere may suffice). Some may be tempted to point at the lower scores of OpenAI, Google and Faceb…

The full marks for Google in the 'member-states' section made me laugh out loud. -- Bard is not available in the EU. ;)

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

#25
post #20
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 funcit…

Especially for a server GPU, looking up watts and multiplying by time per token should give you a pretty good number.

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

#26
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 believe the concern is everyone wants a foundation model, each one may have a comparatively tiny energy/carbon cost (vs yearly global usage and carbon output) but if there's lots of organisations training them up this all adds up. The energy data can help decide how much of a problem this is to worry about (solved through open models you can fine tune rather than always starting from scratch or maybe some regulations around model licensing that looks like the FRAND terms you see for patents and other IP.

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

#27
post #11
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.

„It’s useful, why not“ is not a good basis for regulation.

Although the EU seems to think otherwise time and time again.

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

#28
post #10

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?

You are one wicked free thinker dude.

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

#29
> The legal validity of training on this data as a matter of fair use, especially for data with specific licenses, and of reproducing this data, remains unclear.

It's noteworthy that Fair Use is a largely American doctrine that does not appear in European copyright law across the board.

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

#30
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.

Or just lobby the regulators like alcohol industry did.
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