Ask HN: What's with floating point operations and AI regulations?

I've noticed a trend in AI policy (e.g. the EU AI act or the USA's AI executive order) to include references to quantities of Floating -Point operations to differentiate between AI models but I don't really understand the rationale behind it or what the language actually means. For example:

```

Until such technical conditions are defined, the Secretary shall require compliance with these reporting requirements for:

          (i)   any model that was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^26 integer or floating-point operations, or using primarily biological sequence data and using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^23 integer or floating-point operations;

```

What does this mean to me as an engineer? I normally see FLOPS (which I think of as a measurement of operations per second) but this seems to be about total operations without a time dimension? How did this language get into legislation and why does it seem so widespread?