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Comment by h1fra

5 days ago

People will complain, but eventually Europe will still be in advance regarding this kind of law. It's annoying and sometimes slows down innovation but US companies are just doing whatever makes money without restrictions...

10 comments

h1fra

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lo_zamoyski  5 days ago

> slows down innovation

A return to the classical understanding of the person, society, and the common good is indispensable.

  • saalweachter  5 days ago

    I don't even know that I would call it slowing down so much as constraining/focusing innovation.

    There's three basic paths for a company hit by this ruling to comply:

      1. Stop showing users generated content.
  2. Figure out how to generate the content with more quotes and attribution to source websites, to regain the protection offered to search engines.
  3. Figure out the hallucination problem, so that every statement in machine generated content is true, or at least defensible.

    If this ruling forces companies to put more money into #3, whereas now they're coasting on good enough, I'd say it was speeding up innovation.

    • Terr_  5 days ago

      There was already a ton of collective incentive for #3, I don't think the companies are choosing to "coast on good-enough."

      Rather, they are stuck unable to do that much better, unwilling to admit (especially in a way that might spook shareholders) that it's a hallucination-machine all the way down. They're playing for time and market-share while hoping some unspecified and inherently-unpredictable new discovery arrives which will be compatible with their existing infrastructure and investments.

    • NateEag  4 days ago

      > If this ruling forces companies to put more money into #3, whereas now they're coasting on good enough, I'd say it was speeding up innovation.

      The thing is, no one has the slightest idea how to stop hallucinations.

      The models are fundamentally "hallucinatory" at core - they generate what is _probable to follow the string thus far in its training corpus_, modulo RLHF and friends.

      Notice that nothing there has any rigorous relationship to truth.

      Sure, the companies could start pumping money into pure research on what models other than transformers might yield something that can reason rigorously, but at that point you're talking about finding a way to throw out LLMs entirely in favor of a less-pathologically-broken model, like Gary Marcus keeps complaining people should be doing.

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jijijijij  5 days ago

Quite frankly, in this very instance, Europe's slow tech adaptation and comparatively little investments are a blessing.

At this point, there is nothing to gain but volatility. Let the US figure out the economic and social disruption, and then adopt whatever sticks. There is no rush. The useful parts got little moat. It's not like there is a magnitude of difference to justify the expenses and risks of frontier operations, in comparison to open models, or smaller players. Chances are, all of this AI business will settle on local models for most use cases. The US may get their first trillionaire, but let's be real, that's not because of innovation but corruption, exploitation and raging wealth inequality. If the AI economy is not panning out as "projected", there is no recovery. That money got converted to heat and single-use hardware trash. Not worth risking pensions and the social fabric over "the tech edge".

l23k4  5 days ago

This is the kind of legislation that only exists to help the rich and powerful and harm those below them, it's certainly not an example of where EU is doing better than the US.

Or what, do you think it's a genuinely good thing that hosting negative reviews is essentially illegal in Germany?