Can the EU AI Act deliver?

The EU passed its AI Act at the end of the week, its mandarins celebrating this landmark with what can only be described as glee. The?Act provides some protections for citizens, especially from facial recognition, but the real question is whether the approach to large AI models of the type that have burst on the scene are appropriate or not.

In my view, the carve-outs in the Act for open-source are healthy. Concentration of power remains a substantial risk from AI. Open-source is an antidote. Getting it done this week reduces the chance of bigtech to load it down to their favour as they did with GDPR. Although I rather doubt Thierry Breton’s assertion that the Act would be a launchpad for EU startups.

We can’t avoid the reality that the technology is also moving really rapidly. It’s becoming increasingly clear that GPT-3.5-capable models are getting smaller and smaller — think laptop size this year and phone size next. These are plenty good enough to deliver real applications (both good and bad ones). Techniques like 2-bit and 4-bit quantization, which shrink models and let them run on cheaper hardware,?are proving to be effective. New architectures like state-space models may perform better than transformers,?which underpin today’s LLMs, especially on longer documents. French AI firm, Mistral AI , dropped a new open-source model that uses Mixture of Experts (reputedly the technique used in GPT-4) on BitTorrent. Anyone can?access and modify this model?with reasonabl-ish hardware.

Finding that balancing between innovation and regulation that supports social outcomes (which may include requiring more innovation) is going to be tough. Will the implementation and enforcement allow for the kind of continuous review and adaptation that this environment calls for?

Happy to discuss in the comments.