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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

In general I find the EU AI act quite reasonable. There are a couple AI uses that will be prohibited (most mentioned by the article, mostly manipulating people or dystopian government stuff). But imho the meat of the act is in categorizing many use cases as "High Risk", which comes with a list of requirements. Things like putting some effort in thinking about risks, into your training data, understanding biases, having documentation and logging, options for manual intervention etc. Most of it wouldn't be out of place in a best-practices guide for deploying AI models (even though obviously most of it is extremely high level)

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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 prevents good products.

That being said, I agree that there are certain decisions and actions that always should require a human appeals process

Do you think there’s some kind of karmic point scoring system that you win by being the first one to build horrible unethical dystopian AI models?

Or are you just complaining you won’t be able to horrifically exploit people using them to make lots of money?

…because, sure, red tape is bad, but is it ultimately that terrible not being a allowed to be super villain?

“But America has super villains! …! We’re being left behind…”

Ok… um. Yeah… I’m ok with that. Please don’t try to be a super villain.

These laws don’t seem nearly as outrageous as you make them out to be.

That's a position I do share, but let me play the devil's advocate for moment:

What if an AI research company doesn't want to be a supervillain or do bad things but they (or their investors) decide it's safer to just do the research in a jurisdiction where they face less risk of being subjected to regulatory burden especially during the early exploratory stage. Surely they'll care about abiding to the rules of one of the major world's markets, but they'll so it after they have a mature product.

At least that's how I interpreted GP's comment. EU will eventually get the product that confirms to the safety specifications that we all agree they should, but it will be a foreign product.

Flashback to 1880 Oklahoma, US:

"What if an oil research company doesn't want to be a supervillain or do bad things but they (or their investors) decide it's safer to just do the research in a jurisdiction where they face less risk of being subjected to regulatory burden especially during the early exploratory stage."

Edit: In case anyone is confused, Post 1880, Land in modern day Oklahoma was considered "unassigned" according to the genocidal government and led to a "Land run" where vigilantes, crooks, scammers and generally unsavory people flooded the area - creating "Boomers" and "Sooners" that were given license to go and steal land from native people's where there were no govt regulations and they just started drilling for oil basically immediately

I'm sorry but despite the edit I still fail to get the point you're making.

The idea of searching for places to do product development that have fewer structural protections for residents is unconscionable.

This kind of "externality washing" is talked about as though it were some kind of amoral or practical business matter separate from ethical decisions, rather than an explicit attempt to avoid responsibility for the community that you are moving into.

That is to say, organizations look for economic areas that do not have power structures that will scrutinize, push back or otherwise enforce community social standards on said organizations. Capital will always find a downtrodden population to exploit for it's own development BECAUSE they do not have other protections.

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 is going to their manufacturing rival China and it will also boost Indian development manufacturing.

Brussels is doing everything in their power to deindustrialise and make Europe less competitive on the global market..

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 manufacturers.

Do we know that’s actually because they weren’t able to innovate on their own due to Brussels regulation, or some other factor?

> 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.

The point is that regulation doesn’t just kill unethical startups, it kills all startups.

Why would it kill all startups?

The amount of AI startups that are being restricted by this are minimal. Hugging Face isn't going to have to shut down because of this. University research into the best ways to stabilize GAN training isn't going to grind to a standstill. Companies developing weeding robots aren't going to have to turn to symbolic AI for image recognition. Scientists are still going to be able to model landslide risk caused by receding glaciers.

Maybe only 1% of AI start ups will be negatively effected by this to the point they would be better off leaving Europe.

I am not in a EU country and I would never ever vote to join the EU, but this is one of the better EU legislations. Saying this would "kill all startups" is like saying GDPR will kill all internet business in Europe. Its both alarmist and false.

I don't understand what you're arguing for. You want the EU to throw ethics out the window to encourage business growth?

No one us saying throw ethics out, they just see a different risk/reward balance than the EU regulatory bodies

One that seems to pretty much throw ethics out the window.

I think he is saying that laws have unintended consequences. And a law with good intentions (preventing bad AI outcomes) can have the unintended effect of discouraging entrepreneurs from choosing europe to build a new company.

I know plenty of people who avoid the healthcare sector because of HIPAA and avoid handling credit card data because of PCI. PCI and HIPAA are well-intentioned but can scare off innovators.

PCI isn’t a law. It’s a standard that the free market decided upon by itself. You’re making the exact opposite point than the one you are intending to make.

I don't think I am. The point is that well-intentioned rules can have the unintended consequence of stifling innovation.

>Or are you just complaining you won’t be able to horrifically exploit people using them to make lots of money?

Having watched this new brand of "AI" capitalists behave, that's exactly what they want to do with it

Yeah, like food safety regulations, other places still won't abide. It's not like "other places still will allow abuse of their citizens" is a great argument for us to as well.

Safety regulations exist in every major industry, and sometimes it slows some progress for the sake of individuals. This isn't a bad thing.

In the food industry there (generally) isn't a big isn't a big prize or defensive moat for being the first to develop a new product at scale. Especially at the national level.

Many capital intensive internationally traded industries are different. Once overseas competitors have been through a few innovation cycles and sunk tens of billions of dollars into product development it's basically impossible to catch up. Even with government support.

TSMC is the canonical example, but similar principals apply with Amazon and other big tech companies with high infra spending. More subtly, industries with high marketing costs are very hard to penetrate at scale when an incumbent has reached a certain depth. See enterprise software with MSFT or high fashion with LVMH.

As well as losing the opportunity for economical development in a new industry, dependence on overseas imports for critical industries creates geopolitical headaches.

European governments recognised this risk in aerospace a few decades ago, and the Airbus project saved Europe and the world from a Boeing dominated international passenger jet market.

I don't know why people compare software regulation to the regulation of physical things that do obvious harm like food regulations.

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 certainly needs more rigor like the other engineering disciplines. However the AI act is premature since AI ultimately is an implementation detail for a variety of use-cases, that should be regulated independently, not AI. Regulating AI in general is like regulating electrons.

If the EU has an issue with AI potentially resulting in more misinformation, then regulate the types of sites, that is social media, that would be the vector for such spread.

I'm open to counterexamples outside those class of examples.

I don't think you need counterexamples, because your base argument is faulty. Food full of formaldyhde only causes harm as the product of human usage, i.e. someone eating it, regulation aims to make it impossible for such a situation to arise. For a less extreme but no less real example, just look at the regulation of raw milk in much of the world.

Elsewhere in the thread you have touched on firearm regulation; it's worth noting that amongst states with the capacity to do so, it is really only the US that abdicates its responsibility to regulate firearms, with predictably tragic consequences (though, as with everything in the US, that varies state to state etc.)

Your example is flawed because the harm is obvious and palpable. Not to mention food in most countries must disclose ingredients that are used. Take alcohol which is known to be poisonous. Do you support its banning: yes or no?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959903/

Food should be regulated because as you mentioned it is consumed and is a vector for obvious harm. In addition to that due to the fact that food is comprised of chemicals, it is difficult to ascertain the quality of food once prepared without consumption.

Banning AI is like banning books. Useless. Information will spread either way. It'll just do so elsewhere.

Who banned AI? This discussion is about regulation of AI to reduce its capability for harm, not to ban it outright.

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

Sure. There are people who think guns are harmless and do not need to be regulated. There are those who do.

At the end of the day guns do not shoot people on their own, though.

Yes, but gun regulations don't operate under the assumption that guns shoot people on their own. They operate under the understanding that people who do damage can do much more damage with guns than without.

Pretending that any of the regulation of guns or AI is done with the understanding that they are anything other than powerful tools that can be used by humans to do profound damage is a strawman argument. We all understand that guns don't shoot people on their own. Don't oppose regulation by characterizing the opposing viewpoint as something it isn't.

I'm well aware of the distinction. I'm simply saying that it is a fact that guns do not shoot people on their own. Some countries regulate differently, obviously. You also seem to think governments, which are made by the said humans that can do "profound damage", are infallible.

At the end of the day you either democratize the access, or you don't. Those who want to break the law will break it either way. All you are going to do is punish those who follow the law by not giving them access.

For what it's worth - I couldn't care less about guns and wouldn't mind their banning. However I trust my government. If you do not, I would not want guns to be banned. But that's the thing - a government I don't trust would not want citizens to have guns to begin with, and thus the dilemma.

I don't think governments are infallible, and I didn't argue as such. I don't agree that regulations are inherently bad. If you want to race to the bottom, I can easily pull out some extreme scenario of giving AK-47's to every citizen upon graduating Kindergarten, but it would be a stupid argument based on nothing you've actually said, other than taking your point to the most extreme extent. Please give me the courtesy of not assuming I hold the most unreasonable extension of my argument as well. It only sabotages the conversation.

People driving drunk do profound damage as well. Cars don't kill people on their own. Would you agree with making drunk driving legal again?

When a tool allows a person to do a lot of damage, it should be regulated to prevent bystanders from taking the brunt of other peoples' bad decisions. A race to the bottom doesn't really help anybody.

If you're going to argue that every tool that allows people to do harm should be not regulated at all because the tool isn't anthropomorphized, I'm not sure how we can have a discussion at all about it.

> People driving drunk do profound damage as well. Cars don't kill people on their own. Would you agree with making drunk driving legal again?

No, because drunk driving inhibits your ability to operate a vehicle lawfully.

a better example would be using your phone while driving. should this be illegal? it's well documented that using your phone, even if hands-free increases car accidents. should phones be designed to automatically shut off while in a vehicle?

your ak47 example is also just silly. please use better examples to make your point.

It is still a regulation, and supports the argument that a tool that can be used to do damage should have rules to reduce the risk and severity of damage where reasonable.

There are already laws governing phone use while driving in many places. In my experience, people using phones while driving can be extremely dangerous, and I've often wished that people couldn't do so.

My AK-47 example was intentionally silly, and was framed as something silly and extreme, as a direct comparison to you accusing me of believing that government was infallible. I'm not sure why you're pointing out that something I explicitly pointed out as extreme and unreasonable is extreme and unreasonable. That was the entire point: that we will get nowhere by attacking straw men.

Given that Switzerland allow guns, this idea is that guns will make it worse is wrong. People don't need guns to make significant damage. Because guns are harder to get in Europe, nut-jobs used trucks.

The solution is to educate people to do less self or other's harm. To understand how to operate with these things.

But educating people is expensive and difficult. It also sometimes backfire in creating a population that's much harder to persuade. So yeah let's regulate these idiots to death...

I don't disagree with you, and I find Switzerland a really interesting example. Building good education, good culture, and good social values is often a much healthier outcome than regulation. In my experience, trying to build effective, reproducible education is not just expensive and difficult, but nebulous as well. A lot of American attempts to better their education systems have been expensive for questionable benefit.

I'd much rather have a good culture than good regulations, if I had the choice. I think most people would, but there's no sure path to get there. Switzerland has some magic sauce that other countries would be hard pressed to replicate at scale.

But software can do obvious harm. This is surely one the most important lessons of the internet era

Yeah it really can’t though. If there’s mercury in the tuna that’s obviously and unequivocally bad. If there’s funny memes supporting the other political party that’s supposed to be equivalent?

It may be less acute than mercury poisoning, yes, but social media and the search engine-optimized web encouraging polarization and radicalization in adults, and exacerbating mental illness in children, have been pretty harmful outcomes, not to speak of them being leveraged by state actors with that intention.

We use software to make all kinds of harm preventing and harm causing decisions. Military, medical, social, policing, financial. Pretty much all aspects of life

This comment is so disingenuous it's ridiculous. It's like opposing gun regulation with some contrived scenario about water pistols and Nerf guns.

It is enough to recognize that at minimum, people disagree about which software things cause harm whereas people overwhelming recognize that lead in food is bad.

Given that reasonable people disagree, it's not even close to comparable.

Well yeah. Lead in food is very specific. Software is very broad. Nobody said all software was bad.

What is an example of a specific, non-controversial harm that software causes?

The way social media acts as an echo chamber and may intensify extreme viewpoints and isolation from fellow citizens isn't extremely controversial. It has also been leveraged as a tool for good, helping prevent many people from being effectively suppressed, but it's hard to deny the harm that comes from engagement-driven advertisement algorithms systemically stoking people's anger and sense of personal victimization.

The trends of polarization and politically extreme positions in America in particular over the past 30 years are profound and striking.

Many military applications, obviously. Most of that is intentional harm. There’s a lot of unintentional harm in software too, such as biases in models for medical insurance companies, policing and the justice system.

Considering how much software actually export controlled under, e.g. ITAR (coming from the US by the way), your point is?

I am pretty sure that regardless of where you are if you sell a product in the eu that violates eu law you will be fined. Furthermore you may be banned from selling in the eu all together. Meaning legit ai companies in the eu will flourish while ai companies not following the rules will miss out on the richest market.

So in effect the eu is protecting it’s citizens work from theft and companies from unethical competition.

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.

The privacy respecting european tech giant is the citizen. Also there is significant contribution to ai coming from the old world, some of the most brilliant minds are from here. And whats the point in having gazzilionaire corporations with offices surrounded by tents and poverty? Where’s the progress in that?

People seem to forget dystopian cyberpunk was a parody and warning, not a playbook or something desirable. But as long as people can pretend to be part of the new, neo-feudlist tecj overlord class they don't seem to care. Until the inevitable, Zorg-like, FAANG / MAGMA layoffs happen and kick them out of the door that is.

Well exactly.

> I do hate GDPR popups tho

They really are "let's annoy people people so they hate GDPR popups", not so much "GDPR popups".

You would not ask "can I track you?" to random people physically entering your store as a storekeeper.

by what metric is it working fine?

Yes. Sorry, I mean most of them metrics.

> The effect is going to be that all the innovation happens elsewhere, big AI companies will develop outside Europe.

Why though?

Like, most of the requirements listed in the AI act seem extremely reasonable and low-overhead, if not seriously meek. Given the immense budgets AI labs can call upon, why would "having to fill a form that says you made sure the AI wasn't racist" be a disqualifying factor?

Let’s see how much effort the compliance is. Just having to know about it is a burden for a small startup.

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...

Okay, but how many is it? How many VP-backed ones complain vs small businesses that don't? How do we control for the small businesses that just have no voice and toil away quietly?

If you want total freedom, unhinged and unlimited capitalism, not a single thread of law applying tor pursuite of wealth, well, bad luck, because you don't even get this in the US. Admittedly so, the US are scaringly close.

You seem to be replying to a totally different point. Did you read my question? If so, is there a reason you're not answering it?

Then it should be factored into the profitability of starting in the AI sector. And just like for tax, there will be new external audit services that lower the costs of these overheads. In a way, these regulations create whole new kinds of industries

These kind of industries add no wealth. They reduce the productivity of the economy.

Productivity is a narrow metric for the success of society. Without these kinds of regulatory non-productive industries you would likely have fewer and worse social services, such as roads and the police. You would also be exposed to more risks in your daily life, such as pollutants and poisons. In the long term, these industries can allow for safer and more efficient societies.

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?

It's as unanswerable a question as "how many lives would have been lost by dangerous medications with long-term side effects that didn't become apparent in the term of testing?"

We can't really know whether it was a net good or a net bad because we can't take a look at the reality that didn't happen. What we do know is that there were deadly medications on the market before the FDA. There were medications available over the counter that were outright poisonous. Arsenic and mercury were in common medicines.

It is a balance. You can sacrifice lives through inaction, or sacrifice lives in the way of progress. Lack of regulation is bad, but so is overregulation.

Actually there is a huge amount of research into this. The wide consensus seems to be that the FDA is far too conservative and overall having more lax approvals would have saved many more lives in net.

Studies saying that the "FDA is too conservative" does not mean that the optimal situation would be no FDA at all.

I don’t think anyone in this thread here is saying that there should be no FDA regulation at all?

I would like to see this research.

This is a very balanced comment, strange that it is getting downvoted.

And how many have been saved because medical approvals are difficult?

We don’t know! But to ask incredulously about only one side of these questions is disingenuous.

History has those answers, recent history I mean. E.g. Contergan.

Medical regulations are written in literal blood and dead people. Really good example for Chesterton's fence.

Maybe we would have a cure for most cancer by now.

You cannot see the damage done by regulation, but it exists.

Regulation is always a trade-off.

It’s not “us vs them”. It’s us vs us.

Jesus, no idea what to say here... Just one thing: mRNA vaccines, coming out of cancer treatment research, one of the most sucessful companies is actually German, and they use the mountains of cash they made during Covid, partnering with Pfizer on Covid vaccines, to really push the cancer research.

Unregulated medical research is bad, like in really, literall Nazi doctor bad. Shocking it still has to pointed out...

this is a straw man, less regulation does not immediately mean Nazis. I mean come on be reasonable

A buncjlh of the EU rules around medical research and drug development is, in fact, based on experience with leteral Nazo experimentation done by the likes of Dr. Mengele. Dor once not an internet drope, but rather historical fact.

Sometimes it feels like allowing scammers and crooks is kind of the goal, isn't it?

What? I don’t follow the logic. How could regulation in favour of protecting the rights of citizens over corporations be intentionally facilitating scammers?

I meant that being to scam people is an actual goal of people opossing rwgulations like the discussed AI act or GDPR. Or financial regulations, the whole crypto space, last weeks over hyped society saving tech, is built on the assumption financial reulations don't apply to crypto.

I am all in favor of reasonable, individual rights protecting regulation. The EU AI act might just be one, as is GDPR.

Ah, sorry. I guess I misunderstood. Thanks for clarifying!

Fine. Promoting innovation as an ideologiy has become camouflage for mass exploitation. Most 'innovation' that happens in SV is either advertising nonsense or so new trick to avoid labor laws.

I've lived in both the USA and The Netherlands and I now live in The Netherlands. I recently had to renew my Dutch driver's license and the entire process so painless and quick. Compared to my experiences doing the same thing in both Virginia and California it was a lovely breeze. That's progress. That's innovation.

Don't even get me started on the byzantine nonsense that is the IRS versus the Belastingdienst. I'll take the Belastingdienst any day.

Americans wouldn't know real innovation if a walkable neighborhood arrived on a highspeed train and began eliminating healthcare bureaucracy.

> Americans wouldn't know real innovation if a walkable neighborhood arrived on a highspeed train and began eliminating healthcare bureaucracy.

Thanks for the laugh, beautifully put.

In general I agree with your point, Americans hyperfocus on certain types of innovation (reinventing this or that wheel, "revolutionising X", like every single bullshit "reinventing transportation" "like a train, but much worse" proposal out there), mistake everything else for lack of innovation, and totally miss the forrest for the trees. New and different stuff is celebrated, even if it's an obvious disaster in the making for most involved (e.g. Uber destroying labour protections, Airbnb putting immense pressure on already stressed housing markets, idiots reinventing trains but worse with "pods").

Meanwhile American companies are drastically behind in many niches (airplanes, cars, trains, railroad companies, cosmetics, etc.), but you don't hear Americans complain for their lack of innovation. But when anything EU is mentioned "innovation is dead, Deutsche Telekom is so old and just sucking Brussels money". When Intel gets subsidies to manage to catch up to the competition because they stagnated it's strategic, but when EU funds go for anything it's handouts propping up failing industries.

I think the big difference is the US is customer-focused, and the EU is employee-focused.

To be stereotypical: in the US organisations exist to provide value people choose to pay for (e.g. electric cars; cheap rocketry; cheaper accommodation for travel; cheaper and much more convenient taxis); in the EU they exist to employ people, and hopefully they provide value, but if they don't provide much it's fine because it's pretty difficult to start a competitor anyway.

> I think the big difference is the US is customer-focused, and the EU is employee-focused

I think this is simply untrue. US is profit focused above all, customer experience be damned. If you need examples, check Boeing killing people to get a plane out as soon as possible with ridiculously bad engineering choices; railroad companies skimping on decades old safety tech to keep profits as high as possible; healthcare being the quagmire that it is; massive companies posting record profits while laying off employees en masse; extremely customer hostile practices like like selling customer data everywhere; abusive pricing models on basic infrastructure like internet and mobile; etc. etc.

The only segment I can think about where you can legitimately say "customer-focused" is in hospitality, and that's only because employees have to, them getting any money depending directly on customers being very happy. For me it's to annoying extents though.

> in the EU they exist to employ people, and hopefully they provide value, but if they don't provide much it's fine because it's pretty difficult to start a competitor anyway.

Also disagree. That's not how things work, even in flag airlines, let alone private companies. And no, it's not difficult to start a competitor outside of capital-intensive market segments, which is the same everywhere.

>The effect is going to be that all the innovation happens elsewhere, big AI companies will develop outside Europe.

The EU has rules for aircraft and automobile manufacturing and yet Airbus and Ferrari seem to be able to continue to be world leaders in their fields.

Moreover, there are very few restrictions on many industries in Somalia, yet for some reason it fails to be a hub of innovation.

Regulations don’t immediately mean a flight of intellectual capability to less restrictive places.

> Regulations don’t immediately mean a flight of intellectual capability to less restrictive places.

This. Most people forget that the US is still a highly regulated place. And the tech hub (California/Bay Area) is a highly-taxed and highly-bureaucratic area too...

It's not deregulation or investment. Innovative economies are like emergent behavior. They spring out of chaos and no one has no understanding so far how that happens.

I am not arguing for zero regulation.

I’m saying you have to consider the price of regulation.

Airbus is able to compete in the airliner market because it’s a huge incumbent.

Maybe this is the price we have to pay for safe planes. But there is almost zero competition in the airline manufacturing sector because the regulation is keeping out any potential competition.

> ...and then also somehow end up giving a bunch of money to its telcos.

A funny but probably true prediction. Brussels loves handing money to PTTs the way the US Congress loves handing it out to Raytheon.

The only way to avoid falling under the provisions of the act is to not have any customers in the EU -- that's quite a big market to cut yourself out of, and definitely something a big company cannot afford to do.

The EU AI act is more for protecting people from being exploited by companies and institutions and having AI take the fall.

Basically what they're trying to prevent, is that you can't deny someone welfare, or an insurance claim, or a close their bank account with the justification that "computer says NO"[1]. For every such decision, a human should be at the wheel who can bring a legal fitting justification and be responsible for it.

[1] https://youtu.be/x0YGZPycMEU?t=8

That seems like a very reasonable stance. AI is a tool like any other, the entities with agency that use it are still people.

>New transparency and risk assessment requirements for providers of (generative) foundation models like GTP

Anyone following the space would be aware that there's currently a huge Cambrian explosion of innovation in foundation models going on. Something like this, requiring you to go through a bunch of potentially expensive bureaucracy would completely kill this growth in the EU, to the benefit of the larger players.

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