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Do Foundation Model Providers Comply with the EU AI Act?

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

#51

Post by TeMPOraL »

TekMol wrote: post #46

Is there a term for a country where ... - there are so many laws and regulations, that everybody is violating some of them - therefore only a tiny fraction can be brought to court - therefore everybody lives in the constant fear that they suddenly arbitrarily get crushed ?

United States of America? I may be biased by reading mostly English-language content on-line, which predominantly focuses on US issues, but my impression was that this is exactly what's happening in the US due to volume of regulation at state and federal level, and I've seen plenty of articles and discussions bringing this up.

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

#52

Post by magnusmundus »

RobotToaster wrote: post #48
supermatt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is pure FUD. ALL the regulatory activity mentioned in the article is related to "high-risk" AI systems, which are specifically: - where the AI is part of a safety system, and where that safety system already needs to undergo conformity assessment. OR - where the AI system poses a significant risk of harm to the health, safety or fundamental rights of natural persons - for very specific use-cases https://…

>where the AI system poses a significant risk of harm to the health We've seen pushes from both sides to redefine anything they disagree with as harmful to mental health .

Both sides of what?

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

#53

Post by hdkrgr »

supermatt wrote: post #41
Simon321 wrote: post #40

Seems to EU is determined to cripple their AI industry at all costs, we already have so little technology companies... Foundation models are labelled as 'high risk'! In my opinion this is way too premature... this would cripple open source AI as well... > While the act includes open source exceptions for traditional machine learning models, it expressly forbids safe-harbor provisions for open source generative system…

That article is pure FUD. ALL the regulatory activity mentioned in the article is related to "high-risk" AI systems, which are specifically: - where the AI is part of a safety system, and where that safety system already needs to undergo conformity assessment. OR - where the AI system poses a significant risk of harm to the health, safety or fundamental rights of natural persons - for very specific use-cases https://…

it goes further than that. the technomancers blogpost gets a lot of the actual requirements completely wrong (for example the supposed requirement for third-party or government "licensing". Which is nowhere in the Act).

What really frustrated me about this whole discussion is seeing some SV heavyweights quoting this article uncritically and screaming about how stupid the EU is again, while referring to supposed requirements that are nowhere to be found in the act. I would assume these people have access to the best information in the world, yet they don't seem to have had any of their staff actually read the draft. :/

FWIW, I quickly wrote up some of my thoughts about what the technomancer's article gets wrong at the time, but then didn't get around to polish and publish them. If you're interested, here are my notes: https://gist.github.com/heidekrueger/bdee0268ecdad5f6b56f557...

Edit: I want to emphasize that I DO share some of the concerns that the blogpost raises about the current draft of the act. I just wish we could have a meaningful discussion about it rather than namecalling and fearmongering.

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

#54

Post by mrtksn »

Simon321 wrote: post #40

Seems to EU is determined to cripple their AI industry at all costs, we already have so little technology companies... Foundation models are labelled as 'high risk'! In my opinion this is way too premature... this would cripple open source AI as well... > While the act includes open source exceptions for traditional machine learning models, it expressly forbids safe-harbor provisions for open source generative system…

EU crippling innovation through regulation is a know mem3 but can you actually name regulation, which crippled innovation?

It's usually the Americans who are freaking out over this, I assume based on their local experience. It’s the same thing about the unions or any other stuff that works completely differently in EU and USA. it cuts both ways, European understanding of the American healthcare system is also a caricature.

wrong analogies also help, like assuming that EU is like the American federal system or that the European law works like the American law.

In the specific case about artificial intelligence, EU is interested in regulating high risk systems, but the online conversation revolves around people freaking out that EU will ban their home grown language model.

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

#55

Post by hdkrgr »

Simon321 wrote: post #42
supermatt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is pure FUD. ALL the regulatory activity mentioned in the article is related to "high-risk" AI systems, which are specifically: - where the AI is part of a safety system, and where that safety system already needs to undergo conformity assessment. OR - where the AI system poses a significant risk of harm to the health, safety or fundamental rights of natural persons - for very specific use-cases https://…

If this wouldn't apply to these foundation models then why would they write an article on how they currently comply or not? > We assess the compliance of 10 foundation model providers—and their flagship foundation models—with 12 of the Act’s requirements for foundation models The whole point of this article is to see what would apply to theses models!

Since there's some confusion about this:

- The AI Act regulates both 'high-risk AI systems' and 'foundation models' and applies different requirements for them.

- 'foundation models' are essentially defined in the act as "very large scale and expensive generative ai models that will probably only be offered via API" (my words). The reason the act wants to regulate them is so that USERs of foundation models have a chance to make their downstream use case complaint if that use case is high-risk. For example, if I'm a health insurance provider and I'm using a chatbot enabled by GPT4 in my health insurance sign-up flow, then my system may be high-risk and needs to be compliant. I need access to some information aobut GPT4 (e.g. expected error modes, potential biases etc) to do that.

- The wording of the act makes a point of highlighting that your run-off-the mill open source generative AI project will not constitute a 'foundation model'. The exact scale at which a project will become a regulated 'foundation model' is not yet clear, but it can be assumed that it will be at least tens of millions of dollars. If you can spend that much on compute an researchers, I think you can spend a few k on becoming compliant.

- The technomancers article confuses requirements for High-risk systems with those for foundation models. (It also gets some of the high-risk requirements completely wrong, but that's another discussion.)

- The stanford HAL website does a great job with the facts! I really value seeing thoughtful contributions to the discussion like theirs. (Especially from an American institution!)

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

#56

Post by Simon321 »

mrtksn wrote: post #54
Simon321 wrote: post #40

Seems to EU is determined to cripple their AI industry at all costs, we already have so little technology companies... Foundation models are labelled as 'high risk'! In my opinion this is way too premature... this would cripple open source AI as well... > While the act includes open source exceptions for traditional machine learning models, it expressly forbids safe-harbor provisions for open source generative system…

EU crippling innovation through regulation is a know mem3 but can you actually name regulation, which crippled innovation? It's usually the Americans who are freaking out over this, I assume based on their local experience. It’s the same thing about the unions or any other stuff that works completely differently in EU and USA. it cuts both ways, European understanding of the American healthcare system is also a caric…

I am from the EU, not an American. I am not anti regulation in general. An example of where this has happened before was with GMO's:

> In 2006, the World Trade Organization concluded that the EU moratorium, which had been in effect from 1999 to 2004,[12] had violated international trade rules.[13][14]

We had a moratorium for years and even now we have the most stringent GMO regulations in the world. This crippled GMO research in Europe.

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

#57

Post by dariosalvi78 »

TekMol wrote: post #46

Is there a term for a country where ... - there are so many laws and regulations, that everybody is violating some of them - therefore only a tiny fraction can be brought to court - therefore everybody lives in the constant fear that they suddenly arbitrarily get crushed ?

it's called "normal country". It turns out that there are so many laws that we are breaking the all the time.

Examples:

https://lawlinguists.com/break-law-every-day/ https://mccreadylaw.com/blog/breaking-law-every-day/ https://www.rd.com/list/weird-laws/ https://brittontime.com/2021/01/08/top-10-ways-people-breaki...

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

#59

Post by v7n »

Simon321 wrote: post #47
v7n wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion it's about time to clarify rules and standards for automated systems that can for example kill someone if their output is incorrect.

ChatGPT and stable diffusion are killing people now? I think incorrect output of regular software is actually killing people but we don't need a license to write code.

I chose my words to include this "regular software".

Do you plan to integrate ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion to a high-risk system? I would advise against it at this time.

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

#60

Post by hdkrgr »

RobotToaster wrote: post #48
supermatt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is pure FUD. ALL the regulatory activity mentioned in the article is related to "high-risk" AI systems, which are specifically: - where the AI is part of a safety system, and where that safety system already needs to undergo conformity assessment. OR - where the AI system poses a significant risk of harm to the health, safety or fundamental rights of natural persons - for very specific use-cases https://…

>where the AI system poses a significant risk of harm to the health We've seen pushes from both sides to redefine anything they disagree with as harmful to mental health .

The AI Act EXPLICITLY enumerates all use cases that will be considered 'high-risk' (Annex III). If your use case is not on the list (or on the 'prohibited' list), then you're good to go. There's no mechanism where someone opposed to your model can argue you should be high-risk because of supposed harms perceived or dreamt-up by some political group. (Caveat: The list of high-risk use cases will probably be able to be amended by the Commission unilaterally after the regulation is enacted.)
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