Meta’s AI leaders want you to know that fears about AI’s existential risk are ‘ridiculous’

What happens next? This does not mean that the EU will adopt these policies outright. Next, members of the European Parliament will have to clarify the details with the Council of the European Union and the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, before the draft rules become law. The final legislation will be a compromise between three different projects from the three institutions. European lawmakers aim to give final form to the AI ​​law by December, and the regulation is expected to enter into force by 2026.

You can read my previous article on the AI ​​Act here.

Bits and bytes

A fight over facial recognition will make or break the AI ​​Act
Whether banning the use of facial recognition software in public places will be the biggest battle in the final negotiations for the AI ​​Act. MEPs want a blanket ban on the technology, while EU countries want the freedom to use it in the police. (Politic)

AI researchers sign letter asking to focus on current AI harms
Another open letter! This comes from AI researchers at the ACM Fair, Accountability and Transparency (FAccT) conference, urging policy makers to use existing tools to “design, test or resist AI systems to protect democracy, social justice and human rights ». Signatories include Alondra Nelson and Suresh Venkatasubramanian, who wrote the White House AI Bill of Rights.

The UK wants to be a global hub for AI regulation
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has touted his country as the global home of AI regulation. Sunak’s hope is that the UK can offer a « third way » between the EU’s AI Act and the US Wild West. Sunak is hosting a summit on AI regulation in London in the autumn. I am sceptical. The UK may try, but its AI companies will ultimately be forced to comply with the EU’s AI Act if they want to do business in the influential trading bloc. (Time)

YouTube could give Google an AI edge
Google has tapped into its video site YouTube’s rich video repository to train its next large language model. This material could help Google train a model that can generate not only text but also audio and video. This apparently hasn’t gone unnoticed by OpenAI, which has been covertly using YouTube data to train its AI models. (The information)

A four-week AI startup raised 105 million euros
Talk about the AI ​​hype. Mistral, a brand new French AI startup with no products and almost no employees, managed to raise €105 million in Europe’s largest ever seed round. The founders of the company previously worked at DeepMind and Meta. Two of them were behind the team that developed Meta’s open source Llama language model. (Financial Times)