>We’re rolling out Meta AI in English in more than a dozen countries outside of the US. Now, people will have access to Meta AI in Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe — and we’re just getting started.
No EU initially - I think this is the same with Gemini 1.5 Pro too. I believe it’s to do with the various legal restrictions around AI which iirc take a few weeks.
LLM chat is so compute heavy and not bandwidth heavy that anywhere with reliable fiber and cheap electricity is suitable. Ping is lower than average keystroke delay for most who haven't undergone explicit speed typing training (we're talking 60~120 WPM for between intercontinental to pathological (other end of the world) servers).
Bandwidth matters a bit more for multimodal interaction, but it's still rather minor.
They just said laws, not privacy - the EU has introduced the "world's first comprehensive AI law". Even if it doesn't stop release of these models, it might be enough that the lawyers need extra time to review and sign off that it can be used without Meta getting one of those "7% of worldwide revenue" type fines the EU is fond of.
Am I reading that right? It sounds like they’re outlawing advertising (“Cognitive behavioural manipulation of people”), credit scores (“classifying people based on behaviour, socio-economic status or personal characteristics”) and fingerprint/facial recognition for phone unlocking etc. (“Biometric identification and categorisation of people”)
Maybe they mean specific uses of these things in a centralised manner but the way it’s written makes it sound incredibly broad.
Facebook has shown me ads for both dick pills and breast surgery, for hyper-local events in town in a country I don't live in, and for a lawyer who specialises in renouncing a citizenship I don't have.
At this point, I think paying Facebook to advertise is a waste of money — the actual spam in my junk email folder is better targeted.
Claude has the same restriction [0], the whole of Europe (except Albania) is excluded. Somehow I don't think it is a retaliation against Europe for fining Meta and Google. I could be wrong, but a business decision seems more likely, like keeping usage down to a manageable level in an initial phase. Still, curious to understand why, should anyone here know more.
The same reason that Threads was launched with a delay in EU. It simply takes a lot of work to comply with EU regulations, and by no surprise will we see these launches happen outside of EU first.
In the case of Switzerland, the EU and Switzerland have signed a series of bilateral treaties which effectively make significant chunks of EU law applicable in Switzerland.
Whether that applies to the specific regulations in question here, I don't know – but even if it doesn't, it may take them some time for their lawyers to research the issue and tell them that.
Similarly, for Serbia, a plausible explanation is they don't actually know what laws and regulations it may have on this topic–they probably don't have any Serbian lawyers in-house, and they may have to contract with a local Serbian law firm to answer that question for them, which will take time to organise. Whereas, for larger economies (US, EU, UK, etc), they probably do have in-house lawyers.
It is because of regulations. Nothing is trivial and anything has a cost. Not only it impacts existing businesses, it also make it harder for a struggling new business to compete with the current leaders.
Regulations in the name of the users are actually just made to solidify the top lobbyists in their positions.
The reasons I hate regulations is not because billionaires have to spend an extra week on some employee's salary, but because it makes it impossible for me tiny business to enter a new business due to the sheer complexity of it (or force me to pay more for someone else to handle it, think Paddle vs Stripe thanks to EU VATMOSS)
I'm completely fine with giving away some usage data to get a free product, it's not like everyone is against it.
I'd also prefer to be tracked without having to close 800 pop-ups a day.
Draconian regulations like the EU ones destroy entire markets and force us to a single business model where we all need to pay with hard cash.
> It is because of regulations. Nothing is trivial and anything has a cost. Not only it impacts existing businesses, it also make it harder for a struggling new business to compete with the current leaders.
But, in my experience, it is also true that "regulations" is sometimes a convenient excuse for a vendor to not do something, whether or not the regulations actually say that.
Years ago, I worked for a university. We were talking to $MAJOR_VENDOR sales about buying a hosted student email solution from them. This was mid-2000s, so that kind of thing was a lot less mainstream then compared to now. Anyway, suddenly the $MAJOR_VENDOR rep turned around and started claiming they couldn't sell the product to us because "selling it to a .edu.au domain violates the Australian Telecommunications Act". Never been a lawyer, but that legal explanation sounded very nonsensical to me. We ended up talking to Google instead, who were happy to offer us Google Apps for Education, and didn't believe there were any legal obstacles to their doing so.
I was left with the strong suspicion that $MAJOR_VENDOR didn't want to do it for their own internal reasons (product wasn't ready, we weren't a sufficiently valuable customer, whatever) and someone just made up the legal justification because it sounded better than whatever the real reason was
You didn't provide the source for the claim though. You're saying you think they made that choice because of regulations and what your issues are. That could well be true, but we really don't know. Maybe there's a more interesting reason. I'm just saying you're really sure for a person who wasn't involved in this.
You also said that when Meta delayed the Threads release by a few weeks in the EU. I recommend reading the princess on a pea fairytale since you seem to be quite sheltered, using the term draconian as liberally.
The text of the law says that the actual criteria can change to be whatever they think is scary:
As regards stand-alone AI systems, namely high-risk AI systems other than those that are
safety components of products, or that are themselves products, it is appropriate to classify
them as high-risk if, in light of their intended purpose, they pose a high risk of harm to the
health and safety or the fundamental rights of persons, taking into account both the severity
of the possible harm and its probability of occurrence and they are used in a number of
specifically pre-defined areas specified in this Regulation. The identification of those
systems is based on the same methodology and criteria envisaged also for any future
amendments of the list of high-risk AI systems that the Commission should be
empowered to adopt, via delegated acts, to take into account the rapid pace of
technological development, as well as the potential changes in the use of AI systems.
And there's also a section about systemic risks, which llama definitely falls into, and which mandates that they go through basically the same process, with offices and panels that do not yet exist:
I'd call that the "anywhere but US" phenomena. Pretty much 100% of the times I see any "deals"/promotions or whatnot on my google feed, it's US based. Unfortunately I live nowhere near to the continent.
What a silly, provocative comparison. China is a suppressive state that strives to control its citizens while the EU privacy protection laws are put in place to protect citizens. If you cannot access websites from "the free world" because of these laws, it means that the providers of said websites are threatening your freedom, not providing it.
> China suppresses citizens while EU protects citizens!
Lol this is the real silly provocative comparison.
China bans sites & apps from the West that violate their laws - the ad tracking, monitoring, censorship & influencer/fake news we have here... the funding schemes and market monopolizing that companies like Facebook do in the West is just not legal there. Can you blame them for not wanting it? You think Facebook is a great company for citizens, yet TikTok threatens freedom? Lol it's like I'm watching Fox News.
Companies that don't violate Chinese laws and approach China with realistic deals are allowed to operate there - you can play WoW in China because unlike Facebook it's not involved in censorship, severe privacy violations etc. and Blizzard actually worked with China (NetEase) to bring their product to market there instead of crying and trying to stoke WW3 in the news like our social media companies are doing. Just because Facebook and Google can do whatever they want unchecked in America and its vassal the EU, doesn't mean other countries have to allow it. I applaud China for upholding their rule of law and their traditions, and think it's healthy for the real unethical actors behind our companies to get told "No" for once in their lives.
US and its puppet EU just want to counter-block Chinese apps like TikTok in retaliation for them upholding their own rule of law. Sounds like you fell for the whole "China is a big scary oppressor" bit when the West is an actual oppressor - we have companies that control the entire market and media narrative over here - our companies and media can control whether or not white people can be hired, or can predict what you'll buy for lunch. Nobody has a more dangerous hold on citizens than western corporations.
> China is a suppressive state that strives to control its citizens
China's central government also believes it is protecting its citizens.
> while the EU privacy protection laws are put in place to protect citizens
The fact that they CAN exert so much power on information access in the name of "protection" is a bad precedent, and opens the door to future, less-benevolent authoritarian leadership being formed.
(Even if you think they are protecting their citizens now, I actually disagree; blocking access to AI isn't protecting its citizens, it's handicapping them in the face of a rapidly-advancing world economy.)
>China's central government also believes it is protecting its citizens.
Anyone who's taking a course in epistemology can tell you that there's more to assessing veracity of a belief than noting its equivalence to other beliefs. There can be symmetry in psychology without symmetry in underlying facts. So noting an equivalence of belief is not enough to establish an equivalence in fact.
I'm not even saying I'm for or against the EU's choices but I think the purpose of analogies to China is kind of rhetorical purpose of warning or a comparison intended to reflect negatively on the EU. I find it hard to imagine one would make a straight faced case that they are in fact equivalent in scope or scale or ambition or equivalent and their idea of the relation of their mission to their values for core liberties.
I think the difference is here are clear enough that reasonable people should be able to make the case against AI regulation without losing grasp of the distinction between European and Chinese regulatory frameworks.
The previous poster said that the EU is not restricting the freedom of its citizens, but protecting them (from themselves?). I fail to see how one can say that with a straight face. If you had a basic understanding of history of dictorships you would know that every dictatorship starts off by "protecting" its citizens.
> The fact that they CAN exert so much power on information access in
They don't have any power on information access. They just require their citizen can decide what you do with it. There is no central system where information is stored that can be used in future by authoritarian leadership. But the information stored about American by American companies can be use in such a way if there one day an authoritarian leadership in America.
In my opinion this is a thought stopping cliche that throws the concept of differences of scale out the window, which is a catastrophic choice to make when engaging in comparative assessments of policies in different countries. Again just my opinion here but I believe statements such as these should be understood as a form of anti-intellectualism.
EU? I live in south america and don't have access either, Facebook is just showing what the US plans to do, weaponize AI in the future and give itself accesss first.
Where is it available? I got this in Norway.