European Union lawmakers are set to give final approval to the 27-nation bloc’s artificial intelligence law.

European Union lawmakers are set to give final approval to the 27-nation bloc’s artificial intelligence law Wednesday, putting the world-leading rules on track to take effect later this year.

Lawmakers in the European Parliament are poised to vote in favor of the Artificial Intelligence Act five years after they were first proposed. The AI Act is expected to act as a global signpost for other governments grappling with how to regulate the fast-developing technology.

“The AI Act has nudged the future of AI in a human-centric direction, in a direction where humans are in control of the technology and where it — the technology — helps us leverage new discoveries, economic growth, societal progress and unlock human potential,” said Dragos Tudorache, a Romanian lawmaker who was a co-leader of the Parliament negotiations on the draft law.

Big tech companies generally have supported the need to regulate AI while lobbying to ensure any rules work in their favor. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman caused a minor stir last year when he suggested the ChatGPT maker could pull out of Europe if it can’t comply with the AI Act — before backtracking to say there were no plans to leave.

  • @General_Effort
    5•8 months ago

    Which makes me think that it’ll be used to require models to truly open their “source”

    I forgot to mention: That’s unlikely. It only requires a “summary”, which will be of limited use for reverse engineering the big models. It does, however, provide a club with which to beat small developers.

    I don’t think many people who publish finetunes on huggingface (think github for AI models) will bother with this. I’m not sure what that would mean for the legality of HF on the whole.

    • @[email protected]
      1•8 months ago

      HF already has mechanisms for sharing datasets through the hub so I don’t think this would be a big lift for them legally

      • @General_Effort
        1•8 months ago

        Yes, and some of those datasets might be illegal in some EU countries, but that’s not the point. You need to have the copyright summary so that the model is compliant with EU regulations. Just hosting them for free download is probably fine, if I understand correctly.