Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg
10 hours ago
I doubt it’s the end of AI access in Europe. Even if they do fine them 3% of global turnover, that’s probably a small enough fraction of their European revenue that it’s worth the risk. After all if they drop European traffic it’s not like it’ll change their fixed costs, and the marginal cost to serve Europe is probably relatively small compared to their fixed costs.
I do think it’s most likely that they will end up fining the AI companies quite a bit under this act. It seems like a bit of a pattern with European legislation that disproportionately impacts American tech companies.
I really oppose the notion that “European legislation … disproportionately impacts American tech companies”. US tech has a profound impact on the lives of everyday Europeans while the US has almost no checks and balances in place for the tech industry. Europeans are ought to be able decide how they want to live their lives and build a society. This must include deciding how much influence American tech companies shall be allowed to have by passing laws for Europe.
The whole premise ignores how much the same companies are fined and settling for in the US, for many of the same reasons: privacy abuse, market abuse, societal abuse, worker abuse, etc. Pound for pound the recent Meta settlement has certainly skewed the numbers much higher for the US too.
Also, most US citizens want the same regulations as EU citizens, but only one of them have a functioning government.
No they don't.
2 replies →
Isn't part of " Europeans are ought to be able to decide how they want to live their lives" that they have the choice of using products of US tech companies?
If my manager's manager's manager decides, for any number of reasons, to buy a product which is using US-based technology, then I don't reasonably have the option to "vote with my feet", but I do have a fallback called Regulation, which works its way all the way up the chain automatically.
4 replies →
Perhaps the fines themselves act as a de facto AI tax that some people have been trying to promote in the political sphere, and we'll see how successful it is.
Fines escalate when there is no compliance.
Then they'll just pull out eventually and save everyone the trouble.
2 replies →
Poor American companies, who thinks of them when Chinese government does similar actions, and they play ball, regardless of the government actions.
It's a (successful?) lobbying attempt by Mistral. They are falling behind on tech and they want to win on another stupid EU law. You know what will happen next? There will be an exception carved in for "developing countries" ... like China.
Why would they, both the EU and Mistral specifically, want Chinese models? Isn't the (de facto, underlying) point of the act to raise up homegrown companies like Mistral?
"Why would they, both the EU and Mistral specifically, want Chinese models?" Multiple reasons. US behaving like aholes and forcing EU to make trade with China - in any case it's better tnan war. Cheaper inference HW from China to replace overpriced Nvidia crap. Open models so Mistral and Qwen / GLM may cross–distill. (Hint: why libraries and museums exchange books and arts?) Geopolitics, sanctions, digital EUR – I can't even explain to you all of it in one post which will be downvoted to grey again. And you probably have lost ability to think*. You believe only in what Opus or ChatGPT "summarises" for you. (This is another reason btw). Good luck.
It’s how conspiracy theories work: find out who could theoretically profit, blame them and spread it as fact. It doesn’t have to stand up to scrutiny, if it sounds plausible “you told them like it is”.
5 replies →
The Chinese models are open weights, so they can host & finetune them in the EU. Mistral is calling them "European Compute Units". Mistral has pivoted to become a hosting provider of open weight LLMs.
"Mistral’s platform will support third-party open models, starting with Z.ai’s GLM-5.2. This and future open models will run on the same infrastructure, regional controls, and service commitments as Mistral models, so customers can broaden model choice without fragmenting where their AI runs."
"European Compute Units, or ECUs, convert those commitments into access to Mistral-built infrastructure over multiple years."
https://mistral.ai/news/regional-inference-open-models-new-c...
3 replies →
... downvoting this account to the oblivion may feel good but it doesn't turn reality into "conspiracy theory" LOL. I am glad you are feeling better.
Writing good arguments will prevent you from looking like a conspiracy nut.