Story of European regulations. At some point you have to concede that they are incompetent and unaccountable. What do they care if they depress economic integration and growth in Europe? No one will ever be blamed for diffuse bureaucratic costs that drag down the whole Eurozone.
I even resent people giving them credit for "well, the idea was laudable..". No. Again and again they introduce make-the-world-a-better-place regulations, and whoever opposes these or asks about tradeoffs or whether they are meaningfully useful must be a crazed libertarian or industry lobbyist who wants to poison the people.
I remember how smug Europeans were about the American PATRIOT act. Who could be so stupid to be fooled by such propagandist framing of laws? Well, here in the EU that happens frequently. The commission just has to wrap its degrowth policy in saving-the-world names and off we go. (See also the EU Supply Chain Act, i.e. Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, aka expensive paperwork for a good conscience)
Definitely something I've come around to as well, even though I am very pro-AI and think it's an amazing technology. But the bottlenecks just hit too hard. I notice every day where my usage of AI is so constrained, by myself and my imagination, by external factors like slow feedback loops (gathering requirements), by the AI still not being good enough for certain details (you need to heavily steer it, give feedback, even in long running agentic sessions).
So yes, many aspects of my job are now 10x as productive, but turns out that improves my overall throughput only very little.
Hard to assess what this rule will actually accomplish. Ultimately AI will be involved in all creative processes going forward, so all pieces of media will have at least some basic AI disclaimer. At the same time, the bad actors that the EU is so paranoid about (Russians secretly undermining our democracy and other boogeymen) will obviously not use the label.
But it's another tool in the EU's toolkit to arbitrarily enforce fines on big tech when politically convenient, of course. That's one thing we remain good at.
Unlike the US, wealth takes on the EU could perhaps raise revenue without disrupting innovation, because here in the EU, we have little innovation and self made wealth to begin with - so there's nothing to disrupt.
But taxing inheritances would still be preferred mechanism rather than taxing unrealized gains I think. That would target the EU's unproductive rent seeking heirs the best.
How does it perform on HuggingFaceExploit bench? Suspiciously absent, so not sure if I can take the model seriously.
On a serious note, I hope they improved their extremely sabotaging and unspecific bio safeguards, which prevented Fable from being used in any codebase that ever so slightly grazed medical terminology or data and made me switch to 5.6 Sol.
Ironic that HuggingFace needed Chinese models to defend against it. But of course the spin of the leading firms will just be to point at their trusted access programs and demand that all dangerous activities, even if just defensive, happen via their APIs or be outlawed otherwise.
If that's the position they take then they really should be heavily regulated or nationalized. Cyberdefense against their own models dependent on their goodwill? Sure, but then they have to sell defense capabilities at subsidized rates with a limited margin. Would be very weird otherwise to take the world hostage with their models and then also sell the solution while demanding intrusive KYC.
Perhaps fortuitous timing for OpenAI that they can spin the fact that defenders have to resort to open Chinese models because OpenAI and Anthropic actively sabotage them with nerfed models into a nice message of making Huggingface part of the privileged group entitled to secure systems.
For me, harnesses are mostly sticky insofar as the model providers only allow you to use their subsidized plans through their own harnesses, unfortunately. But of course switching model + harness is an option.
While I'm sympathetic to the frictions of newly introduced AI and the fact that AI in healthcare, especially calls, can seem very uncaring, between the lines the article reads a bit like the typical union complaining about modern tech that reshapes their work, given the multiple mentions of protests, nurses union, etc.
Given how healthcare is one of these sectors that seems to relentlessly resist efficiency increases and is the prime example of Baumol's cost disease, I think any developed country with a costly healthcare system needs to do these AI experiments. The current versions will be shit, but the only way out is through if you still want to provide affordable care.
I honestly have no doubt that AI going forward will be able to do a good job at triaging via calls and also being empathetic about it. But of course it needs careful experimentation.
How do you couple them together efficiently? The nice thing about Codex or Claude is that the delegation or multi agent workflow capabilities are just built-in.
Do you link one with the other as a skill or mcp or so?
Interesting how the prevalent opinion until yesterday seems to have been that OpenAI & Anthropic are irreversibly ahead and now with xAI and Meta at least delivered something that's competitive with useful models and cheap too. Granted, the narrative that the two leading labs are ahead still holds with Fable (and perhaps an upcoming GPT6), but it's not as over as common knowledge by the opinion leaders would have us believe.
I just think that Anthropic's usage of the word "classifier", which implies a minimum level of intelligence, was very misleading. Fact is, you cannot use Fable for anything remotely connected to even elementary school biology or medical topics. There is no attempt whatsoever to distinguish between legitimate and dangerous tasks, except an extremely broad and non-specific rejection of anything related to security or biology.
Aren't they already very cognizant of handwringing like yours? Their article mentions various safeguards and actively steering the model away from being emotional companions and so on. It's a far cry from the OpenAI two years ago or whenever it was when they were entertaining the idea of allowing/enabling adult conversations with their models.
I personally think this is a moralistic regulatory overreach. And they definitely do that due to political pressure too, since there are various bills around the world in various legislatures that want to regulate AIs giving useful advice and being too personal to talk to.
So you can rest assured, I think, at least in that regard. The AI disempowerment will come to us anyway, just in a more sanitized corporate form.
Seems to be a very bad mechanism to ensure democratic control of the technology. There must be better ways, even naively assuming that OpenAI is somehow genuine about wanting to broadly share its stake in the future.
xAI has shown this to be quite lucrative. And it seems to even make some sense - if the contract can be ended on relatively short notice, you basically have the capacity on stand-by if you ever need it yourself (accumulating GPUs is not trivial), but can monetize it if you don't need it.
Though it's probably a bad sign generally that you can't capitalize on all the GPUs you've acquired.
That was my impression in the past as well, but by all accounts pangram works well, at least at the moment.
It also seems quite plausible that it can be made to work by training on a lot of model output. Most of us already have become very sensitive to the various idiosyncrasies of model writing, after all. They have a very distinctive style.
Yeah, I also got suspicious and checked it with Pangram. Sadly 100% AI. Perhaps it still has good points, but my heart drops whenever I sniff the AI prose. I can just query Claude or ChatGPT myself, you know?
The EU simply doesn't have a proper common market, especially when it comes to capital. Having more people than the US and a big economy in aggregate doesn't matter much if you can't efficiently pool resources. Could we in Europe have 100 billion fundraises for a new lab? If not, then it's over and you can give up.
Which is a mistake the EU makes again and again. If you put onerous requirements on everyone, this means that the most well-capitalized firms will be able to shoulder the regulatory overhead the easiest. But who can't? New European startups. This already killed part of the tech sector with the GDPR while Google and Meta just hire 100 lawyers and are done with it.
Wonder if the whole cyber paranoia leads to their models ultimately generating less secure code. After all, if it has the ability to generate safe code, it would imply that it knows something about cybersecurity, which could surely be used to hack all the banks in the world.
So it's like Claude Cowork for Science, i.e. for less tech-savvy users? I would imagine scientists with some coding background might just prefer to use Claude Code normally and integrate it with their stack of choice, but perhaps the comfort and ease of use of Claude Science still wins out.
The money can't all come from the state. If the EU wants to compete, it should create a common market worth its name where EU companies can raise billions like American ones. If that doesn't happen but we instead pat ourselves on the back for setting aside a pithy 5 million Euros in some EU budget to support open source, it's never going to happen.
I know that Europe thinks so (I'm from there too), but we aren't remotely competitive enough for decoupling. It's bowing to US demands or falling further behind economically. Self-made problems, of course, since the common market is still way underdeveloped, much because of nationalist egoism and coordination problems between the member states.
I don't think a critical mass of them will oppose the US. The most likely equilibrium is Chinese models being shut out of any US-aligned markets (i.e. Europe at the very least, also East Asia, etc.). Probably India, Russia, Brazil etc. will resist such pressure, but they are protectionist and resilient to trade wars anyway, at the expense of their own welfare of course.
If the US really cracks down on frontier model access, you'll see them make Chinese open models illegal. You might say "oh well, let them try", but they will just put direct and secondary sanctions on every company whose systems have used Chinese models in some way. They just have to make an example out of a few international companies and no one will dare to use Chinese frontier models, at least commercially.
But the strength of differential privacy is that you can now make this tradeoff explicit and quantify it. I always liked it because it offers a mathematical solution to a policy problem, but then of course it's up to us to decide what parameters and tradeoff to choose. Also, some data might just not get published at all if the privacy implications are too problematic, so differential privacy might buy you more signal!
This has dampened my opinion on Anthropic quite a bit. It's difficult to take their marketing for AI as an empowering technology seriously when they are quite clear in their new deployments that they do not mean empowering for you, but empowering for them and organizations that are in their (or the US government's, despite Anthropics performative disagreements with the administration) good graces. You are allowed to vibe code some dashboards, a web app or let it drive Excel, but anything more interesting than that is forbidden.
If it was just plain monetary concerns and sabotage of competitors I'd almost be fine with it, but it seems they actively want to monopolize most of human progress in their enlightened hands, lest the mob does something undesirable with these powers.