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Comment by ru552 | Hacker News Reader

Mistral is in France though and the EU is throwing cold water on "AI" at the moment. I think this hurts them in the long run.

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Or it could help them be more globally competitive because they’ll have built their product to accommodate the EU rules and will be ready if/when other countries introduce something similar.

Maybe in 1970 someone was arguing that Volvo is handicapped because Swedish safety regulations have become so stringent that their cars can’t compete on price elsewhere. Turns out it was exactly Volvo’s strength to be ahead of the curve on regulation.

It's possible, but the AI space right now is all about the vibes and even the French President isn't feeling it[0]. The job market for AI/ML people is white hot right now and this is something Mistral has to try to explain around in an interview. I hope they do well despite it.

[0]https://www.ft.com/content/9339d104-7b0c-42b8-9316-72226dd4e...

Regulations are accumulative though, not just relative to your era. So a critique in 2023 would be more relevant than one in 1970 as the pure scale of it has increased dramatically.

I've seen a few graphs showing staffing counts and budgets for US regulatory agencies have grown exponentially since the 1970s (adjusted for inflation), while it was relatively flat before then in the 60s. Economic regulation growth in the US has grown steadily while social regulations (workplace, climate, healthcare, transportation etc) grew dramatically. Adding in TSA / Homeland security and it's a hockey stick.

https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/za...

I'd be curious to see similar charts for the EU.

The EU’s new AI Act is the first regulatory action in the world targeted specifically at AI models. In that sense it’s now 1970 for this domain specifically.

In a democracy I'd expect regulation to grow alongside population and productivity. It would be interesting if it didn't, actually.

> Turns out it was exactly Volvo’s strength to be ahead of the curve on regulation.

That's a weird analogy. I don't remember Volvo ever being that big. If anything they're bigger now than they used to be (I mean: I don't remember a world with lots of Volvo when I was a kid... I may be wrong though). And with about 650 000 vehicles sold per year they're not in the Top 25 car manufacturer worldwide by number of cars sold.

Yeah I think most people would consider Volvo - a standard bearer for safe vehicles for over 100 years - a success

The EU makes in it’s proposed law a lot of exceptions for open models. It might be a big selling point for mistral (or Facebook) but maybe tricky to deal with for closed models like OpenAI.

Except that they're not throwing cold water on opensource models. So, maybe that helps them in the long run.

Also, I'm not sure how much the EU is really going to matter for the future of AI.

You don't really need to conform to their regressive tendencies if you don't want to do business with the EU. Or you could dumb your stuff down for them if it ever comes down to it.

Generally, it just wouldn't be worth it to care too much about what the EU thinks.

Have to see the final text, of course, but open source models apparently got some breaks in the final agreement last Friday.

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