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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI and Microsoft will be hit by a big bus called GDPR.

"Unveiling the Crucial 5 GDPR Obstacles of ChatGPT That Can’t Be Ignored" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709482

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The LLM / foundation model industry will happily stay in the United States and ignore the stifling regulation of the EU if necessary. There is so much market share to capture domestically at the moment.

In the US it will get sued for copyright violation and similar.

New laws would have to outlaw fair use, that will likely not happen as the only country that ignores such laws will win, especially now that the cat is out of the bag.

They can redefine fair use without removing it entirely. Thing like that happen all the time.

Will it be effective? Dunno, but LLMs aren't as easy to duplicate or execute as films are to pirate or watch, and yet copyright law still gets enforced somewhat.

Don't threaten the EU with good time

Lol you can have Crypto in E.U but not fancy new A.I, same how you can have A.I in USA but not Crypto :)

One day, we'll have crypto where "mining" is helping train the AI. It'll be allowed nowhere.

Been thinking this for awhile, there are a couple projects in this space

I'm writing sci-fi in this space, foolish archaeologists plug in an ancient hard drive an wake up a god.

What some call stifling regulation others call regulating monopolies.

I have no idea how OpenAI would look at this, and of course there are similar obstacles here re:copilot vs. gpl, but couldn't they just shut off European access.

I think AI would be so important that Europe couldnt afford to not have AI. Wonder how this would resolve.

My guess is that the petty little bureaucratic tyrants in the EU would much rather deprive their subjects of new products than give up any sliver of their power.

One could hope that this would cause a rebellion, but recent history suggests that the populace will go along with anything their lords decree.

Short reply: lol

Longer reply: I love the EU so much. One of the few institutions taking big tech to task. I can roam cell operators at no extra cost, ensure that companies cant data mine me without my express permission and other wonderful tech oriented regulation.

It is extremely narrow minded to believe that throwing all principle out the window is the only way to «not stifle innovation».

«The lords decree», where does one even begin. The biggest fight against bigtech involving amongst others the cloud act that lets the us govt spy on anyone in complete secrecy is literally spearheaded by a common man [0].

This entire post is either satire, and if so I ate it hook line and sinker… or it is some kind of privacy exploitation stockholm syndrome.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems

You don’t fight “big tech” by giving “big brother” all your liberty…

Nuance - a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound.

The NSA is the biggest of Brothers in the world and supposedly the country keeps on innovating and big tech power is strongest here. How do you square that circle?

You clearly have no idea about how the european union works. It is a much lighter touch on society in general than the us is. We might not have as much gun freedom, but on pretty much every other scale I’d rate the EU higher than the US on «liberty».

No one is banning books about gay people in my kids school for example.

Either way curtailing big tech with regulation has nothing to do with big brother. They are regularing companies, not individuals.

> "No one is banning books about gay people in my kids school for example."

Check out some of the schools in Poland, or Hungary.

This conversation is clearly talking about the good or bad that the EU does. Are those books banned because of the EU? Would they stop being banned if Poland or Hungary was not part of the EU?

If anything, what would unban those books is pressure by the EU.

The US government similarly has nothing to do with states like Florida going off the deep end.

I think this is saying that all the good things in EU countries are the result of being in the EU, while none of the bad is?

If you, personally, end up restricted from doing things you used to (pay for my software, for example) — you gave up liberty for security, and now have neither.

I’m Canadian, by the way. We now can go to prison for wanting to call our children the name we gave them at birth.

You've liberty to be poor, die without healthcare, or get rekt in court by a megacorp with infinite lawyer money

> Longer reply: I love the EU so much.

As a EU citizen: You really shouldn't.

They do occasionally pass decent legislature, but i fear GreedClarifies is likely correct that it's probably more about them wanting the power big tech is currently centralizing for themselves.

For examples check the recent news from Belgium as they've uncovered recent corruption issues in the European Parliament. There is even an organization funded by the EU which is unapologetically treating political refugees as prisoners (putting them behind bars with literal cameras in their "living" space.

There was a pretty good report on German state media about that topic, should have English subtitles though if you can't understand it https://youtu.be/tJMLNMlJkPw

I am glad they're currently pushing back against big tech though, as FAANG is already speedrunning our society into a total dumbsterfire, but love to that organization is just misplaced. (Or should we call it MAMAA now? Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet Amazon)

Even these monopolies are bound to be disrupted by competition (as we‘re likely about to see in the case of google)

You mix up privacy wrt to the state (which has the monopoly on violence) vs private organisations. Two very different cans of worms. The EU is determined to fight the latter while embracing the former (as its incentives would suggest)

I've got a lot of complaints about the EU, but this one makes no sense.

Well power is toxic that way unfortunately, I’m happy we’re having a bribery scandal right now (even if it’s being ignored by much of the media) and that things like Chat Control is being brought up (https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/).

EU will do a lot in the name of its subjects, but in the end it comes down to power and money. Anyone thinking it won’t end up as a totalitarian forced unification of the member states are sorely mistaken, or viewing it within the context of a minuscule time frame.

-> petty little bureaucratic tyrants...One could hope that this would cause a rebellion

Is the rebellion funded by Google and Microsoft? Because that is a conspiracy theory with some legs...

The great thing about the current-gen LLMs — anybody will be able to run one on the next gen of hardware. We’re within one order of magnitude of the capacity right now on retail hardware.

The moment of transition from “data-centric” (big centralized system/database) to “agent-centric” (locally stored/run systems and identity, sharing arbitrary data/storage) has arrived.

GDPR, LLM “guard rails”, … — only the plebs will be affected by those.

I believe you could run GPT-2 at home now.

Remember when OpenAI claimed that was too much power to allow open access to?

Benevolent overlords patting the filthy masses on the head.

> The moment of transition from “data-centric” (big centralized system/database) to “agent-centric” (locally stored/run systems and identity, sharing arbitrary data/storage) has arrived.

I agree. Use cases such as LLMs-as-backend-of-my-web-stack will move a lot of compute back to the edge of the network, eventually.

if it wasn't problem for Google, then why would for ChatGPT?

It isn't. No court has ever interpreted the GDPR in the bizarre way suggested in the linked article.

Who knows. Maybe it's GDPR whose getting hit by a bus.

At some point, US companies will get fed up with constantly being harassed by the EU and just give up on the relatively small (as in money, not population) European market entirely. The hostility is simply not worth it.

For a sense of scale - the EU has 0 (zero) of the 14 largest companies by market cap. Out of the next 25, only a handful are in the EU.

Go ahead and bet your money on that

If your prediction happens, then EU based startups/companies that'll fill the void will booom.

I like Europe, but a climate for entrepreneurship is not something you have.

That's irrelevant imo.

If FAANG announced leaving EU, then somebody's stock would go up hard, at least on the beginning.

And productivity would falter even more without Google and Apple…

Why? There are various search engines that perform sufficiently well, all ran by start-up (Neeva, Kagi etc.).

Android is a suitable alternative for iOS.

The absence of European tech giants might reflect the consolidated nature of software rather than the competence of the EU.

The world's third largest tech sector is in a European country (the UK), and the two country's bigger than it are literally continent-scale superstates with around 10x the GDP.

The EU is set up to regulate already giant companies, which means it's not possible to create new ones because they can't afford the regulatory risk. (Mostly because the regulations are intended to troll American companies, not to do anything useful.)

And there isn't sufficient venture capital to build up new ones either. Maybe they can all adopt Yandex and VK.

>Mostly because the regulations are intended to troll American companies

Which one?

Why do you think that there are 0 (zero) EU tech companies that have "boomed"?

It’s just like reading the fan fiction on Macrumours. Any day Apple are going to leave the EU over the Digital Markets Act, any day now!

And not a single one of them would be missed or affect European quality of life if they would be gone. How would Europe survive without Facebook...Microsoft spyware and Google advertisements?

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