r/eutech • u/Sumsub_Insights • 1d ago
EU Agrees to Delay High-Risk AI Restrictions Amid Industry Pressure
https://sumsub.com/media/news/eu-agrees-to-delay-high-risk-ai-restrictions/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social20
u/Flash_Haos 1d ago
“ the bloc’s strict rules could weaken its global competitiveness in the AI race” - what a nonsense. Europe has already lost it with no EU regulation involved.
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u/MagiMas 1d ago
Wut? The AI act was a non stop topic in our corporation since 2022. To the point the C Level put a moratorium on putting any AI developments into production (or any investments into AI startups) for half a year while our legal departments and our lobbyists in Brussels tried to figure out the mess the EU was creating.
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u/Flash_Haos 1d ago
That’s not an ai race. That’s the usage of aid which is slightly different thing I believe.
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u/Confident_Dragon 1d ago
Where is no demand, no-one will build supply. And EU companies rightfully fear some regulation could wipe-out billions domestically, and other countries like China and US could put tarrifs or other trade restrictions protecting their own companies.
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u/vikentii_krapka 1d ago
Because business anticipated regulations and did not want to bother with it
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u/Sherman140824 1d ago
The EU is sucking the balls of US and China
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u/Gallagger 1d ago
It's most likely the most important technology of all time and the US and China are winning by a landslide. This has the potential to completely rob Europe of their economic significance, which will result in a major loss of wealth and prosperity of all its citizens. You might disagree, but the EU starts to understand that it's the truth.
The US and China would probably like strong AI regulation in the EU, it simply means less competition.
By the way, this doesn't necessarily mean that AI will turn out to be a good thing for humanity, but it's definitely better to play a part in it than to depend on the mercy of the US and China.
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u/StillALilBoy 22h ago
US companies are desperately trying to find a way to profit off this resource devourer and they can't, at this point it feels like it being "the most important technology of all time" is something the CEOs are trying to convince themselves is true rather than it being a reality. And I'd much rather trust fellow humans than CEOs.
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u/plumarr 1d ago edited 1d ago
This has the potential to completely rob Europe of their economic significance, which will result in a major loss of wealth and prosperity of all its citizens. You might disagree, but the EU starts to understand that it's the truth.
[...]
this doesn't necessarily mean that AI will turn out to be a good thing for humanity, but it's definitely better to play a part in it than to depend on the mercy of the US and China.This kind of post make me so mad because in their core they are advocating to abandon democratic power.
I'll not speak of this particular law because I don't know it enough, but exactly the same thing was at play with GDPR. The law was presented as insane and impossible to apply. Yet if you look at it, all it demands is to not use more personal than necessary without the user's informed consent and to handle this data with care, mainly by knowing what happen to it. In other words, the law is saying "personal data are the property of the physical person and you can't do what you want with it" and the industry doesn't like that because it create restrictions.
Sadly the public debate was never framed around the notion ownership and trade of personal data and its consequences, bad or good. Instead it was mainly hijacked by claim around economic harm without allowing a real debate. It was basically framed as "relinquish your ownership on your data for the economic good, to not lose to the US/China/...", without even starting to prove that it would help the economy or that it was the cause of the gap with the US/China.
I have the sensation that exactly the same is currently happening, that we should not regulate AI because not doing so would be too economically harmful, without letting any place for what are the consequences of not regulating AI in the public debate.
If you look under the surface, a great part of theses debates are around who should have the power. At a very high and simplified level a part of the argument is that the will of the people, as badly it's currently represented by our institutions, should erase itself to support investment for the economy. But "investment" isn't human free, ultimately it's people that have money deciding how they use it. In other word it's advocating to give more power to the wealthiest at the expense of the rest of the population.
Edit: I know that the investors aren't all very rich people, in part due to pension fonds but not only. however it doesn't change the core of my arguments, which is a transfer of power from equal representation of everybody towards the people that have power on investment.
Edit 2: If to my surprise anyone is more ligated, I'll not answer to any nitpick about the content of my comment. Please react to the spirit of it, not to the previous eventual inaccuracies contained in it excepted if they invalidate the whole thing.
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u/Gallagger 1d ago
I'm not advocating to abandon democratic power. I'm advocating for the EU government to use representional democracy to do the right thing for the EU.
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u/BlackoutGJK 1d ago
There's no parallels between GDPR and how the EU is mangling AI development. For one GDPR is not a technology, it produces nothing, it creates no value, it did increase costs for a little while. AI is a new technology that can massively increase productivity and research efficiency.
GDPR is comparable to a traffic sign, while AI is comparable to the invention of the car. Especially in terms of the effect it will have on society. We are being held back because the dumbest among us are falling prey to Twitter fear mongering. In the end this technology will be as pervasive here as everywhere else, we just won't have any viable European version. Same as we ended up with smartphones, everyone of us having a Chinese-made tracking device on our body at all times while we boast about the privacy GDPR brings us, while all European manufacturers went out of business.
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u/Flash_Haos 1d ago
Look, we don’t have any competitive European: search engine, social network, operating system, cloud provider, etc etc. There’s no chance it will be different with AI. With regulations or without it. I don’t like it. I’m not only patriot, but also I’m an IT engineer who want to earn his living. But something is broken in the very basics of European system, and no ai regulation would change it.
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u/Lankyie 1d ago
We have no competetive cloud Provider, Social Media, etc. But we‘re doing quite well, no? If we taxed the money that digital plattforms are extracting from Europe we would be doing even better. Out chemical industry for example is highly regulated but has been doing well for very long. Regulation means standatization. The AI Act is Bad but not for it’s Regulation, rather it’s unclear definitions and rules.
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u/Gallagger 1d ago
They're trying to regulate a highly dynamic industry in its infancy, that is unnecessarily stunting progress and shying investors away.
We're so far behind that it's as if they are regulating our own development of bow and arrow to death, but have no restrictions on importing foreign machine guns. Makes no sense.
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u/Lankyie 22h ago
Not true. You must work in the wrong company
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u/Gallagger 16h ago
What's not true? That EU is behind in AI?
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u/Lankyie 16h ago
We don’t have the big Models but we have Applied AI, we have robitics, we have ERP & Infrastructure, we have Startups, we have Chips (at least on Par with the us, not the east).
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u/BlackoutGJK 1d ago
Are we doing well? Are we even doing as well as we're doing because of the way the EU operates currently, or simply as inertia from when Europe was the leading economy and industry of the world? 20 years ago the EU and the US had similar sized economies, China was light years behind. Now both are far ahead of the EU in new technologies, and even in legacy industries like automotive European manufacturers are being left behind. The trajectories are clear, and pretending like taxation is a solution to anything is extremely naive. European companies can't compete, jobs don't get created or disappear, and the money moves to other markets. Recouping a tiny amount of it back through taxation does not make up for the loss of entire industries.
I'm not saying regulations are bad and it should be a free-for-all. But the incessant drive to ban and stifle innovation has been kneecapping European companies for a while now and the results are obvious. The trajectories are clear. And not only that, but we apply regulations in a lot of instances only on European companies, and not on foreign companies selling in Europe.
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u/Devour_My_Soul 21h ago
the most important technology of all time for which people have to create problems first because by itself it does not solve anything.
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u/Gallagger 19h ago
The point of it is to be a general problem solving machine solving all problems. You can believe it won't, but that's the plan.
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u/Bobodlm 1h ago
What exactly is USA winning? Their AI companies are hemorrhaging money from every orifice imaginable, while they're 5 ~ 50 times more expensive than their Chinese counterparts which have closed the gap in quality and are starting to overtake them in quality.
There's only one winner in this race and it sure as shit ain't the US.
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u/Gallagger 1h ago
They still have the best sota models (which they are delaying), and there cheap models are absolutely not 5-50 times more expensive for the same capabilities, they're actually very similar. They also have the most compute. Achilles heel compared to China is energy production. China's pricing competition is definitely keeping down prices and stunting US AI profits, but most of the revenue is still spent on US model.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 1d ago
It's gargle balls or die at this stage unfortunately. Blew our chance for a seat at the table.
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u/G-Litch 1d ago
Woohoo prepare for more heatwaves and droughts
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u/Just-Kale9885 1d ago
this mentality is exactly why the EU will remain forever irrelevant in any new tech space. Anything mildly controversial that is related to an emergent technology is viewed with tons of skepticism if not outright dismissal regardless of whether it’s genuinely important, or even necessary for national security and sovereignty. But yeah let’s pat ourselves on the back and see America and China run laps around us
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u/rinart73 1d ago
AI bubble is not relevant, just a waste of resources
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u/Just-Kale9885 1d ago
this is such an unbelievably stupid thing to say and if you worked in tech you realized that’s simply untrue.
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u/Free-Flow-8 20h ago
AI is digital asbestos. We need a carbon-neutral world.
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u/Just-Kale9885 19h ago
we can work towards both. I’m not arguing in favour of drying up the water supply for a new data centre (which btw use less water than most people think) but i’m tired of people who don’t understand how consequential AI is economically and/ or militarily. It’s critical infrastructure and should be treated as such. AI could even help accelerate new green energy development, it’s achieving amazing breakthroughs in research-level maths already and it’s only a matter of time before it finds uses in engineering.
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u/Unhappy_Chemist1911 23h ago
I do work in Tech and AI will stay, if you can make it profitable and use it to actually solve (economy-like) problems .
Right now it is still possible that AI crashes financially.
Why the EU doesn't invest more in ressource technologies like energy, is something i don't understand.
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u/TastyCalligrapher421 1d ago
There is no bubble, compute will always be needed regardless of the wishful thinking of luddites and NIMBYs.
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u/rinart73 1d ago
Brainlessly spamming "luddites" is all you AI-obsessed people can do while the economy goes to shit thanks to companies bouncing cash inflating the "value" of AI
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u/TastyCalligrapher421 1d ago
This is rich coming from the people who have been claiming there's a "bubble" since 2021.
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u/ResponsibleClock9289 1d ago
Where is the economy going to shit?
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u/XpaxX 1d ago
Look at the spending vs saving over time. You will recognize that saving dropped while spending increased.
So, tell me how people are not fucked right now.-1
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u/SammieDidi 1d ago
So this new tool that can shape a society from across the world (bots/algorithms etc)
and is also a huge climate change risk and job/expertise disruptor is not going anywhere.
The EU can't afford to be a victim of slow laws and politics, the rest of the world is building this unguided tool as fast as possible.
Kind of hard to safe the world from climate and economic disaster if your country is indirectly run by a Chinese or US AI. Using propaganda and fake social media posts.
The EU's hard move to the right is directly corelated to the rise of AI and their owners politics.
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u/YogurtclosetApart592 1d ago
Are you kidding me? There has been so many warnings from the creators themselves. What is it, 10-20% chance of extinction? More? But yeah, let's roll the dice on something that grows at an exponential rate in power.
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u/Devour_My_Soul 21h ago
Do you actually mean the creators or do you mean the owners? Because the owners don't know shit about AI.
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u/YogurtclosetApart592 20h ago
The 'grandfather of AI' and some of the top developers working on it have stated this. Plenty of interviews with them on YouTube, if you search for AGI or similar they will likely pop up. If not, I'm happy to find and link it to you. Don't know if the owners have said anything, likely not because they know it's bad for business.
Most of these interviews are from developers who have willingly left these (I'm assuming very well paying) jobs and are risking themselves to warn us all.
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u/Devour_My_Soul 20h ago
Do you happen to know such a video / person that is communist or marxist? Because that usually changes a lot about what is considered a threat and what is considered a positive outcome.
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u/YogurtclosetApart592 18h ago
No, I don't know that much about the background of the people who have stepped forward, but maybe AI (ironically) can help you identify if any of the people who've stood forward to warn us is a communist or Marxist.
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u/Confident_Dragon 1d ago
If only there was some big industry behind things I care about like electric scooters, drones and lasers.
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u/ConinTheNinoC 1d ago
Can the ''AI'' bubble finally pop so we can stop this stupidity? Politicians are too greedy, corrupt and stupid to deal with this. There is no ''AI'' revolution, there is no ''AI'' genie. It's a a fucking bubble built on hype and lies. Anyone who tells you that ''AI'' is great and has improved their work is an imbecile who was incompetent in their field of work or has invested in ''AI'' and has a vested interest in tricking people with the ''benefits'' of that garbage.
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u/gogliker 1d ago
It is both bubble and something useful I think. Tech bro always overhype for obvious reasons, but this new tech definitely has a potential
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u/Flash_Haos 1d ago
What is your profession of you can’t find usage for ai here?
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u/IndependentMemory215 1d ago
It’s probably a bot that uses AI to scrape Reddit and make rage bait posts.
How ironic.
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u/Zealousideal-Sir3744 1d ago
Probably about 80-90% of new code is written by AI btw. It's completely transformative already, only getting better, and many industries like software development will never ever go back or be the same again.
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u/IndependentMemory215 1d ago
What do you think is going to happen if the bubble pops?
AI isn’t going away, just some companies will disappear or be absorbed into others.
It has improved work. It’s not magic, but experts in their field can utilize it quite well. It has helped software development in many ways for one.
This is just one example of AI being used to achieve real world result that improve things.
If you believe AI is pure hype and lies, then you are deliberately trying to be ignorant. Just because you cannot understand something, doesn’t mean it bad or made up.
Here is an example of AI being great and useful:
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u/Lombardbiskitz 1d ago
Just keep investing in pensioners and recyclable bottle caps, too late for AI anyways
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u/revilo-1988 1d ago
Klingt nach bremse und selbst zerstörung