What happens next? This does not mean the EU is going to adopt these policies outright. Next, members of the European Parliament will have to thrash out details with the Council of the European Union and the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, before the draft rules become law. The final legislation will be a compromise between three different drafts from the three institutions. European lawmakers are aiming to get the AI Act in final shape by December, and the regulation should be in force by 2026.
You can read my previous piece on the AI Act here.
Bits and Bytes
A fight over facial recognition will make or break the AI Act
Whether to ban the use of facial recognition software in public places will be the biggest fight in the final negotiations for the AI Act. Members of the European Parliament want a complete ban on the technology, while EU countries want the freedom to use it in policing. (Politico)
AI researchers sign a letter calling for focus on current AI harms
Another open letter! This one comes from AI researchers at the ACM conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), calling on policymakers to use existing tools to “design, audit, or resist AI systems to protect democracy, social justice, and human rights.” Signatories include Alondra Nelson and Suresh Venkatasubramanian, who wrote the White House’s AI Bill of Rights.
The UK wants to be a global hub for AI regulation
The UK’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, pitched his country as the global home of artificial-intelligence regulation. Sunak’s hope is that the UK could offer a “third way” between the EU’s AI Act and the US’s Wild West. Sunak is hosting a AI regulation summit in London in the fall. I’m skeptical. The UK can try, but ultimately its AI companies will be forced to comply with the EU’s AI Act if they want to do business in the influential trading bloc. (Time)
YouTube could give Google an edge in AI
Google has been tapping into the rich video repository of its video site YouTube to train its next large language model. This material could help Google train a model that can generate not only text but audio and video too. Apparently this is not lost on OpenAI, which has been secretly using YouTube data to train its AI models. (The Information)
A four-week-old AI startup raised €105 million
Talk about AI hype. Mistral, a brand-new French AI startup with no products and barely any employees, has managed to raise €105 million in Europe’s largest-ever seed round. The founders of the company previously worked at DeepMind and Meta. Two of them were behind the team that developed Meta’s open-source Llama language model. (Financial Times)
