As far as I heard they had that strategy as a possibility for decades, US experts had warned the current and prior administrations about it’s possible ramifications, warning against attacking Iran for exactly this reason.
The previous German minister of economy, Robert Habeck, had warned of such a situation a few years ago, too.
If you follow the ideology of the Silicon Valley billionaire types, based around Ayn Rand (eg “Atlas Shrugged”) and Curtis Yarvin, as well as what Thiel himself has said over the years, the Antichrist is governmental institutions, seen as the inhibitors of progress. I am not joking btw.
to be fair, there is no plausible explanation for Mistral's fall into irrelevance other than having to deal with regulatory burden. US and CN labs get to feed their models all the data in the world while Mistral has to comply with Let's-Smother-The-AI-Baby-In-The-Crib-To-Maybe-Prevent-It-From-Maybe-Becoming-A-Criminal Act that EU nepo babies had expedited as soon as AI became the current thing.
Mistral had open-weights SOTA when Chinese labs had no noteworthy LLMs at all, and now even its closed-weights offerings are behind half a hundred Chinese models -- most of them from labs with way less funding -- despite having had unhindered access to Nvidia hardware all this time.
I know AI has more regulations here in the EU, but what I don't see clearly explained is what impact that has on pure research: creating new comparable models. So I'm suspicious that it's really impactful. On market deployment, maybe - that's where regulations lie. On internal company research?
Most things in the EU AI Act are entirely reasonable. On its own it's a pretty sensible piece of legislation.
But the US and China are incredibly lenient on enforcing even existing laws against their AI companies. In the US the standard seems to be "no instructions to make bombs or drugs, and the ability to make porn of living people has to be restricted to paid users". Laws around cyber security and copyright that used to be heavily enforced are seemingly suspended for AI companies, or settled out of court. No company that tries to actually follow the law can compete with that
On its own, all regulations usually look reasonable.
It’s when you stack over 100,000 regulations (this is literally the number the EU has created) on top of each other and then combine them with country level regs that you create a system that’s impossible to grow in.
Regulation might have something to do with it but your example doesn't show that imo.
Multiple US labs were taken to court over copyright infringment for their training data. Mistral did the same data mining, but actually the copyright situation is weaker here so it's harder to build a case against them.
I think the capital situation in EU is just worse. A lot of is tied up in more conservative businesses that are reluctant to bet the house on some shiny new thing.
Virtually all modern music uses pitch correction in some way, often very subtly. The human voice is not perfect, and it's very common for even incredibly skilled vocalists to, say, drift slightly flat on a long held note. Or have one note a fraction of a tone off in a tight run.
Typically it's done just to save time. The singer could do takes over and over until it's perfect, but usually if a take is 99% there, you just slightly correct it.
You can tell this is the case if you listen to live recordings, although live pitch correction also exists. Vocalists aren't perfect, even Broadway vocalists and professional opera vocalists will occasionally have pitches slightly off. The human voice is an instrument, but it's not a piano.
The food “photography” I’ve noticed in our local area - and many have started putting up these AI images - all have a weird distribution of shapes to them, a strangely uniform rhythm of same-sized features with almost blue-noise spacing. Every texture looks unnatural in the shapes it presents as, similar to this picture.
Well, the government funds science projects in general, and now they are limiting it based on a very loose list of terms related to ideas counter to their own ideology.
The idea of freedom of speech is to not limit expression of ideas counter to any one ideology.
Also, if corporations donating to political campaigns is speech, so should science funding be - which is now being restricted.
Their usual retort is: “we need more speech in the market place of ideas, not censorship”.
So why don’t they just fund right-wing-aligned projects instead?
if those scientists were to raise money from private donors would they find themselves in jail, or their property confiscated to where they couldnt continue research? that is the definition of "freedom of speech".
if you accept money from the government, you must also accept the fact that that money is political. complaining that losing a barely earned privilege is a loss of freedom of speech is a fucking slap in the face of people who have actually fought hard for freedom of speech.
Government funding is political full stop. it might be bipartisan but it's still political, by definition. if you cannot accept this your policy opinions will always be hopelessly distorted.
btw i have a phd in the hard sciences so i know what im talking about when i say grants are "barely earned privileges". they do not, in general, go to the most qualified or talented scientists, hence the word "grantsmanship" to refer to the skills required to obtain a grant that are not the pure scientific skill
Funny. For me, instrumental music is just as distracting. If I don’t know the music I listen to well enough, my attention will go there and make any coding or reading impossible.
Another awkward overlap with the use of “AI” exists in games, too. Because here AI just means behavior, from a simple Goomba walking left to right to smart squads of soldiers coordinating, taking cover etc.
The previous German minister of economy, Robert Habeck, had warned of such a situation a few years ago, too.
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