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Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

It has nothing to do with the EU laws, or at least not in the sense they want you to think about it: no laws prevents AI players to release their AI models here, but they are all also big tech players who are affected by GDPR, DSA and DMA which harm their business by protecting the consumers.

That's why they use their AI products as a leverage to turn European people against the laws that protect them from big tech. It's just blackmail.

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No, it has nothing to do with the GDPR or DMA. It is due to the AI Act.

https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Act

The AI Act doesn't prevent Grok from releasing their model in the EU! (And ChatGPT early issues were all linked to GDPR)

For the record, Facebook has put a restriction on the use of Llama models in the UE even before the AI Act was passed (and the AI Act doesn't even apply to Llama anyway, except Llama 3.1 405b)

It will come to EU countries eventually, but it takes a long time to go through "conformity assessments". Notebook LM, for example, was geoblocked for the EU for a full year before it became available in June. Grok 1 was released everywhere else in the world in November 2023, and in the EU in May 2024. About a 6 month delay.

> Grok 1 was released everywhere else in the world in November 2023, and in the EU in May 2024. About a 6 month delay.

And here you should see that it has nothing to do with the AI act, as it wasn't enacted before last August!

Furthermore, neither Grok 1 nor Notebook LM would have been subject to the AI act even if it had existed at the time.

As I said before, all of these companies have vested interests against EU's legislation as a whole, and they've tried to blackmail the EU from the beginning. They didn't wait for an actual AI legislation to exist to use AI as just another blackmailing tool.

I think you're misapplying the term "blackmail" here and thus poisoning the well. The EU is applying pressure to companies and companies are applying pressure back--that's not blackmail. They each have their own means of leverage, and they both use them.

First of all both sides don't have the same level of legitimacy and then one side is blatantly lying about its intent by claiming that they are blocked by regulations instead of admitting that they are putting pressure (because they know they have no legitimacy to “apply pressure” on democratic institutions).

Apparently EU regulators were blocking it for unspecified reasons until an agreement was made in May. And even then, they blocked news summaries until after the EU elections. If you can find more info, feel free to cite it. Info about these behind-the-scenes dealings are hard to find online.

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/xs-formally-twitter-gr...

The regulation that the author of this article think about is DSA, even if not named directly. See this quote:

> Well, probably because Grok has already spread various false stories

(The European regulation that deals with disinformation is DSA).

And again it couldn't be the AI Act, because it wasn't in place at that time!

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