Remember this?

Professor John Naughton writes a column for The Guardian about technology and humans. This week he writes “Europe’s AI crackdown looks doomed to be felled by Silicon Valley lobbying power” which is a good bookend to my MTP post about Eric Schmidt bragging he got the UK prime minister to “take the bait” of the Biden Administration’s artificial intelligence executive order that Schmidt & Co. apparently wrote. Mr. Naughton addresses AI legislation in Brussels, the capitol of the European Union and “Silicon Valley’s” lobbying power. Given Eric Schmidt’s history in Brussels when he was at Google (and successfully led Google’s acquisition team that acquired the competition authority for the European Union) my suspicion is that it’s really Google or Schmidt’s investment arm that’s actually doing the lobbying but I take Professor Naughton’s meaning.

Professor Naughton tells us that:

Wednesday [tomorrow] will be a fateful day in Brussels, a faraway city of which post-Brexit Britain knows little and cares less. It’s the day on which the EU’s AI proposals enter the final stages of a tortuous lawmaking process. The bill is a landmark (first in the world) attempt to seriously regulate artificial intelligence (AI) based on its capacity to cause harm and will soon be in the final phase of the legislative process – so-called “trilogues” – where the EU parliament, commission and council decide what should be in the bill, and therefore become part of EU law. Big day, high stakes, in other words.

And almost certain to be knocked down by Mr. Schmidt & Co. given that they can waive their recently acquired US executive order around as bait. The stakes are very high given the expense of hiring the coders who train the AI with massive datasets. Which naturally means that companies like Google and Microsoft can’t “afford” to pay for millions of copyrights they use to train. Kind of like Spotify can’t afford to pay artists fairly given the rent on World Trade Center.

These systems are astonishingly expensive to train and build: salaries for the geeks who work on them start at Premier League striker level and go stratospheric (with added stock options); a single 80GB Nvidia Hopper H100 board – a key component of machine-learning hardware – costs £26,000, and you need thousands of them to build a respectable system. Not surprisingly, therefore, there are only about 20 firms globally that can afford to play this game. And they have money to burn.

It was looking for a while like Europe would set an example to the world for how to regulate AI. That is, before Eric Schmidt wrote Joe Biden’s executive order because we can’t wait around for Congress to act like those stuffy Europeans. Once that idea sank in, Schmidt got right on it.

Suddenly, the French, German and Italian governments combined to advocate less intrusive regulation of foundation models. According to these three musketeers, what Europe needs is a “regulatory framework which fosters innovation and competition, so that European players can emerge and carry our voice and values in the global race of AI”. And so the right approach is not to impose legal regulation on the (mostly American) companies dominating the AI racket, but to allow self-regulation through “company pledges and codes of conduct”.

Now, son of a bitch, where have we heard that before?

Read the post on The Guardian.