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Noted UK AI leftie weighs in with his take on the European Parliament’s AI Act:
The whole thing is premised on a risk-based approach(1) This is a departure from GDPR, which is rights-based with actionable rights. Therefore it’s a huge victory for industry(2). It’s basically a product safety regulation that regulates putting AI on the market The intention is to promote the uptake of AI without restraining ‘innovation'(3) Any actual red lines were dumped a long time ago. The ‘negotiation theatre’ was based on how to regulate [generative] AI (‘foundation models’) and on national security carve-outs People focusing on foundation models were the usual AI suspects People pushing back on biometrics etc were civil society & rights groups The weird references in the reports to numbers like ’10~23′ refer to the classification of large models based on flops(4) Most of the contents of the Act amount to some form of self-regulation, with added EU bureaucracy on top(5)
As John Looney notes, classifying large models based on FlOps is like classifying civilian gun usage by on calibre.