Hugging Face, GitHub and more unite to defend open source in EU AI legislation

https://venturebeat.com/ai/hugging-face-github-and-more-unite-to-defend-open-source-in-eu-ai-legislation/

by thunderbong • 3 years ago

174 161 3 years ago

roenxi• 3 years ago

The EU have regulated themselves into a corner where all they can do is shout at American and Asian tech companies who decide how computers will be used. Based solely on past performance this regulation is likely to be another nail in the coffin ensuring that innovation happens on different continents and then trickles back to the EU at some later date.

The economic upsides of AI look like they will be huge. Therefore the odds are good that this regulation will be a crushing economic own-goal.

southerntofu7• 3 years ago

The economic upsides of AI look like they will be huge.

There are many ways to interpret this sentence. What did you mean?

If you mean a stupid robot can automate most office jobs, i don't disagree (most of these jobs are entirely useless to begin with, anyway). However is that an upside? History has shown our State/corporate overlords are not too fond of ensuring jobless people have a decent life.

malermeister7• 3 years ago

I think it's time we accept the fact that AI will mean the end of capitalism. The system won't be viable anymore once there's no more need for labor.

Where we go from there is up to us.

If we don't do anything, we'll end up with neofeudalism, with the already rich concentrating power more and more, no longer kept in check by pesky labor movements.

Alternatively, we can fight to try to establish a kind of star trek space socialism, where everyone's needs are met and nobody needs to work anymore - people would be free to follow their passions while computers do all the busywork.

Dystopia or Utopia, that's the decision we'll be making over the next few years. The status quo will disappear either way.

peyton2• 3 years ago

I think most people are just gonna ignore whatever this law is. There’s fatigue for sure.

troupo8• 3 years ago

ensuring that innovation happens on different continents

Where by "innovation" you mean "pouring endless VC money into privacy-invasive practices with no external access or oversight".

As for AI... Altman claimed that he welcomes regulation in AI space. When EU came out with a regulation which, among other things, requires companies to fully document their foundational models, he immediately said that he will not work in the EU.

So much for innovation.

gattilorenz• 3 years ago

“[…] privacy-invasive practices with no external access or oversight"

Hey, let’s not forget “while totally disregarding copyright law (and code licenses)” here!

antonvs2• 3 years ago

Well, Altman is CEO of a company called OpenAI, after all - it makes sense he wouldn't be in favor of transparency. Wait that doesn't make sense...

mrd3v0• 3 years ago

Aside from mishits like backdoors in E2EE, which are also being considered in the US, UK and already law in places like China, these regulations will affect privacy-invasive monopolies and oligopolies. They will not affect 'innovation.' Innovation comes from publicly-funded organisations and projects. Even profit-driven startups that innovate are eventually bought out and destroyed by these monopolies and oligopolies EU is actively prosecuting.

oytis6• 3 years ago

Uhm... No? Transformer architecture comes from Google, and it's most impressive applications are developed in OpenAI. Public institutions are seemingly just trying to catch up (like Stable Diffusion developed in LMU a year after OpenAI released Dall-E)

nforgerit6• 3 years ago

They will not affect 'innovation.' Innovation comes from publicly-funded organisations and projects.

Looking at my home-country Germany that is a funny thing to say, since the public sector is living in a 90s/00s alternative OOP timeline and doesn't get anything done. The car oligopoly is frantically trying to gain competence in "user software" by stealing game designers and buying foreign startups. Meanwhile, the local startups are held down by German bureaucracy(tm) which additionally usually doubles down on any EU guideline.

Over the last 20 years, they all reached a level of incompetence which makes it very hard to not believe in a conspiracy.

oakpond• 3 years ago

Cool story bro

vasco• 3 years ago

I think a lot of people believe much of the regulations introduced by EU are a way the EU found of taxing US global tech companies that operate within it without paying taxes.

There's obviously examples of targeted European companies and some privacy regulations were and are needed still, but the motivation is likely at least partially motivated by this in my opinion.

lewhoo• 3 years ago

Or maybe the USA has deregulated itself into a corner where there is no more privacy. Any piece of data can be used for virtually anything as long as big corporations pat you on the back and ensure no "human eyes" will see/process it. If you think the EU is a market that's easily ignored then I guess we'll see in a few years whether easily replaceable batteries come back or not.

The economic upsides of AI look like they will be huge.

The economic and social downsides might be also huge. Remains to be seen and I'm glad the EU isn't diving head first into murky waters.

johnnyanmac6• 3 years ago

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

It's just the ultimately realization of the founding father. Most people long stopped caring about privacy.

If you think the EU is a market that's easily ignored then I guess we'll see in a few years whether easily replaceable batteries come back or not.

I do truly want to see this result. I can honestly see it going either way. Apple has a long history of simply paying off EU fines.

hnlmorg10• 3 years ago

As a manager at a European tech company specialising in AI, I call BS on your statement.

EU legislation doesn’t stifle innovation. It stifles abuse of technology. If the only innovation America and Asia can muster is abuses of technology (I know this isn’t the case but I’m borrowing from your statement) then I’m perfectly fine with the EU lagging behind.

thrown12122• 3 years ago

The “EU bad” line gets rolled out so often on HN it has become its own truth. “Everyone knows” that the EU tech industry is getting strangled by its technocratic regulators and that’s why the EU fails at tech har har look at these idiots. Etc.

nforgerit6• 3 years ago

(I love the EU, I really do. That much, that I really care about its ability for innovation.)

As a European software engineer I'm calling BS on your statement, Mr Manager. EU legislation might not aim to stifle innovation (in contrast, they're always talking about a "level playing field") but their imprecise and vague regulation texts are like a loose cannon for whatever innovative business might come up if you have your first hire to be "the lawyer who gives legal advice in context of EU regulation".

Now, those people will just quietly move away to find a new home-market for scaling up and then eventually selling to EU countries. This is not "lagging behind" but an economical fiasco since the same laws only help local oligopolies of gatekeeper enterprises and (the ones they initially aimed for) Big Tech who can afford licenses and lawyers.

Two little examples (but there's more):

- What about the safe harbor thing? It's all a grey area now after court rulings decided that pretty much all US-EU IT biz is at least partially violating the EU regulations.

- We're now all happily clicking cookie banners and startups are getting sued by third-rate law firms. Some things were good with GDPR but did it help with Big Tech's (and meanwhile Tiktok's) way of collecting data? Nope.

anothernewdude• 3 years ago

I'm so glad the EU exist to protect people from web fonts.

ekidd2• 3 years ago

EU legislation doesn’t stifle innovation. It stifles abuse of technology.

Honestly, my biggest complaints with EU software legislation are:

1. It doesn't scale down to tiny non-commercial or barely-commercial activities.

2. It theoretically proposes penalties on private people outside the EU (even though they are rarely imposed?).

3. I have no vote or representation.

For example, I used to provide tiny, free web apps that performed useful tasks. These often had fewer than 100 users, and they kept no information that wasn't strictly necessary. But if you emailed me about them, I might not respond within a month, especially if I was traveling or something. The GDPR requires 30-day turnarounds for lots of stuff. I shut down all of these apps, because some of my users might have been in the EU? And I won't be releasing any more free web tools. It's all CLI now.

Similarly, I host a small web forum in the US, and we have some EU users. We keep no information beyond that required to run a web forum. If you ask the moderators to delete all your posts on August 1st, well, I hope someone took their computer on vacation.

Similarly, I maintain a couple of open source projects. Many of these are paid for by an employer, who makes the code available for free. In the past, I have occasionally added a feature to one of my projects as a consulting project for someone. But reading through https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-eus-product-liability-dire..., I see that I am now likely to have personal liability for my open source projects, towards people who have never paid me a cent. Sure, I do have liability towards the rare consulting customer who actually paid for something, which is carefully negotiated in our contract. But in the future, some random EU company I've never heard of will likely be able to use my software, pay me nothing, and make me liable? It's very hard to tell with current drafts.

And I have at least one open source AI tool on GitHub, that's of no use to anyone. But I suppose I'll need to read the EU AI laws now, too.

Sometimes I just want to build useful stuff (web apps, forums, open source tools) and give it away for free. But if I have any European users, I may get entangled in complex European laws. Honestly, there's zero upside for me supporting EU users, because I'm not benefiting from them, and I keep having to read hundreds of pages of incredibly vague laws in multiple languages.

If the Product Liability Directive goes through in its current form, and if GitHub offers me a way to block EU downloads, I'll probably use it. I am not interested in supporting or encouraging commerical EU users who have never paid me anything.

flagrant_taco• 3 years ago

While I agree with your main point that this type of legislation doesn't necessarily stifle innovation, the line of what is considered abuse is subjective.

Legislation like this is effectively either the EU attempting to force their opinion of what is an acceptable use of tech on the rest of the world, or the EU committing to potentially fall behind on moral grounds. I actually greatly respect the second scenario if that's the situation, we'd all be better off if people chose their morals over profit and fear.

fnordpiglet• 3 years ago

Depending on the outcome I’ll call BS on your BS. Open source AI friendly regulation would certainly support your statement, while regulatory moat for megacorps with sophisticated compliance divisions would entirely obviate your statement.

There is something though that’s chilling EU tech investment, whether it’s regulation or tech, regulation of funding vehicles, or some other artifact. All factors align to a vibrant EU tech sector, yet it’s just not present. This reflects in ludicrously low salaries, poor career prospects, and a lack of clout - better than trying to force tech standards via imperfect mechanisms like regulation the EU should be setting standards by virtue of its technical ability to create excellent tech standards and platforms.

The best EU tech talent I know is working at some American company, be it megacorps like Google or Amazon, JPMC, or smaller tech companies like Datadog, etc. I don’t gloat in this - I wish all the world were firing on all cylinders in tech, space, science, engineering innovation. That’s the only way out of our broken way of doing things that’s killing our planet and our society.

latexr2• 3 years ago

Comments like this always remind me of Tom Toro’s cartoon:

Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

Technology and innovation should serve the greater good. Unbridled growth for a few companies at the expense of the people is not a positive goal.

johnnyanmac6• 3 years ago

Unbridled growth for a few companies at the expense of the people is not a positive goal.

but "the people" like it and consume it. So what can you do?

hliyan2• 3 years ago

The EU have regulated themselves into a corner where all they can do is shout at American and Asian tech companies

I think you may have this backwards. Consider the Brussels Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect

I used to think of the EU as stagnant compared to the US. But now I realise (especially in light of COVID) that some things we consider inefficiencies are actually safety margins. The EU may not move fast and break things, but I'm starting to view them as slow, steady and generally robust over the long term (think multi-generational).

thrown12122• 3 years ago

And more precisely: “Safety margins are inefficiencies”

This short statement is profound and bears repeating slowly and often to people in any kind of power.

dleeftink• 3 years ago

While protectionism may be detrimental, it is good to question innovation for innovation's sake. Is an economy largely displaced by LM-like systems a welcome one?

The (slight) lagged rollout gives EU-countries some wiggling room regarding what works and what doesn't elsewhere across the pond.

sensanaty6• 3 years ago

If innovation for you == infinite privacy invasive data hoovering in order to make some rich asshole in a suit able to earn infinity + 3 pennies worth of money more, then you can keep it sequestered to the US and Asia.

AI is a cancer that deserves to be burned down before it leads us all into doom for the sake of making shareholders some cash.

stavros• 3 years ago

What has the better mean quality of life, the US or the EU?

j1elo• 3 years ago

shout at American and Asian tech companies who decide how computers will be used

If that were like so, EU would be the one closest to shout how computers _should_ be used.

It's like what happens with industry development vs. the environmental damage it causes: it's faster and easier to progress if you cheat and do it in an unsustainable way.

But the "cheating" is not free of cost. Both in the example and in the real case of AI, you're paying with a different currency than time or money. We'll see how it ends up.

TacticalCoder• 3 years ago

I agree with your comment and I have this to say to those disagreeing: list me the biggest EU software companies and their sizes compared to the SV-behemots.

For a quick googling and the top 10 EU software companies generate 131 billion of revenues combined, which is ridiculously low.

SAP and Siemens AG together (the two biggest in the EU) have a market 1/10th (!!!) of the size of Microsoft.

Can we please get real?

troupo8• 3 years ago

list me the biggest EU software companies and their sizes compared to the SV-behemots.

List me the biggest SV-behemoths that (any combination of any three or four below below is true for 99% SV "behemoths"):

- are profitable

- don't rely on unlimited investor money to survive in hopes to corner the market

- don't rely on lax privacy laws to collect and sale user data en masse

- don't exist to be absorbed by a megacrop at a large price

squarefoot2• 3 years ago

Regulation has nothing to do with progress. You're comparing a single country of over 330 million people mostly coming from a common culture, speaking one language, so big and isolated that it was never invaded from the outside, to an entity only 30 years old consisting of 27 different countries with completely different cultures and languages (currently 24) whose inhabitants saw some of their countries at war multiple times. What the EU has accomplished is a miracle to me.

southerntofu7• 3 years ago

The article is very low on details: what does the regulation contain? what are github and huggingface lobbying against specifically?

we really redoubled our efforts to make sure that they were not inadvertently imposing expectations (...) onto open source developers who are often hobbyists, nonprofits or students

That's about as much info as we get.

Personal/controversial opinion: neural network approach to technology should be entirely banned as it has very bad results and very high computational cost. I don't care that the LLM model hallucinating answers to my serious questions is open source (whatever that means in the context of neural nets, that's another debate), the harm is done anyway. I still do appreciate that "open-source" neural nets could continue to exist as a research field, but that any regulator considers allowing Google/Microsoft/OpenAI to clearly lie to the public using their artificial stupidity is way beyond me.

janosdebugs• 3 years ago

As much as I tend to lean towards your standpoint, you do know that there's ML/AI beyond LLMs, right? A lot of it is fairly mundane stuff like being able to analyze a human-written sentence for grammatical structure (NLP).

rhdunn• 3 years ago

And in applications like text-to-speech/speech synthesis and speech recognition.

Then there are the gray areas like training statistical models that are not ML/ANNs, but are things like Hidden Markov Models and the Vertibi algorithm. While not using ANNs, they work in a similar way in that they are statistical models trained on a large corpus of data, and those models are then used to predict various things like the part of speech, end of a sentence, or the pitch of a phoneme.

southerntofu7• 3 years ago

I personally believe most of these applications bring net negative to society. I personally see two exceptions that i don't have strong opinions about: machine translation, and ML firmware for camera output quality. There's probably more i'm not aware of.

The former has dubious quality but can be useful in certain contexts where human translation is unavailable.

The latter has anecdotally already failed spectacularly in at least two cases:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739235

For example, what are positive applications of NLP you can think about? Most applications i hear about would be to replace human customer support with chatbots (very negative) or for intelligence gathering purposes (very negative). There's probably a lot i don't know about.

oytis6• 3 years ago

If ChatGPT said that neural networks produce very bad results people would say it's hallucinating.

l5870uoo9y2• 3 years ago

The tech community in Europe is naturally scared of (yet another like GDPR) regulatory overreach by a commission who fundamentally doesn't understand neither technology nor market.

southerntofu7• 3 years ago

Maybe your tech community. Mine is not scared, but rather aware, that the powers that be care too little about the people and will not bring about strong regulations that we need to save humanity from climate change, or to protect basic human rights from corporations.

As for GDPR, how would that be a regulatory overreach? If anything, that regulation is so loose and has so many loopholes that it's almost entirely useless to protect people's data, but it's still a win in a good direction. It's also based on privacy laws that have existed since the 70s in various forms in several member states, which have proved their worth so it's not exactly something entirely new their dropped out of their hat.

troupo8• 3 years ago

I'll keep posting this article again and again. The FUD around EU AI Act is extremely strong: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/the-truth-about-the-eu-ac...

Hendrikto• 3 years ago

This guy is neither an AI expert nor a lawyer. I don‘t think we can count on his opinion too much.

tticvs6• 3 years ago

Terribly written article full of bluster and arrogance.

Falls into the typical European cognitive trap of thinking that what is most important is to follow procedure regardless of where the it leads, and completely ignores the fact that the AI tools that are about to be regulated out of the EU are wildly useful.

These companies are not trying to take something from you but are in fact trying to give something to you.

This means that, yes, GitHub and other code repositories are still allowed to host AI model code. Hosting providers don’t have any additional liability under the AI Act, only the providers of the models themselves and those who deploy them.

This is technically correct but ignores that overnight an unknown set of existing github repositories will become illegal in the EU, meaning that github will have to provide tools for users to block their repository from being pulled by EU users in order to prevent the users from accidentally committing crimes. This is wildly disruptive and will be an absolute negative for European technology. All in the name of nebulous "safety" concerns, "data protection", and protecting copyright.

randunel• 3 years ago

overnight an unknown set of existing github repositories will become illegal in the EU

Overnight? Is this proposal not known ahead of time? Is it being kept a secret until enters into force suddenly, at midnight?

These companies are not trying to take something from you but are in fact trying to give something to you.

Copyrighted materials have been stolen, and that's exactly why the creators are keeping secrets, and exactly why they're trying to influence people like you into lobbying on their behalf.

imiric2• 3 years ago

These companies are not trying to take something from you but are in fact trying to give something to you.

That's incredibly shortsighted.

These companies are only concerned with hyper growth and pleasing their investors, and have zero regards about the user, their privacy, and the harms their products unleash on the public. The benefits they offer to the user are tangential to their goals. This has been the MO of every tech corporation in the past 2 decades, and by all means has grown out of control. The oncoming AI disruption will exacerbate this even further.

The tech industry needs much more regulation, not less. If anything, the EU is being conservative in the scope and lagging behind on the timing of these laws.

PeterStuer2• 3 years ago

Direct link to the position paper

https://huggingface.co/blog/assets/eu_ai_act_oss/supporting_...

oytis6• 3 years ago

I would appreciate a read about people behind EU technology regulation rage. Are there any specific lobbying group behind that or is it just some form of collective thinking?

I might be bad at web search, but I couldn't find a single human name on EU AI act - and, FWIW, GDPR.

nologic014• 3 years ago

Its a shadowy groupthink behavior that encompasses the european parliament, the eu member state government executive branches and the EU commission itself (as all must agree for EU wide legislation).

A cunning trick to spread responsibility widely so that you can not hold anybody to account.

I believe they call it democracy or some other such arcane and outdated term.

oytis6• 3 years ago

Democracy requires transparency about how decisions are made, so that I could vote based on whether I support representative's and parties' actions. E.g. if a law is proposed in German parliament it's pretty much open information who introduced it, who objected with what arguments, who supported it with what arguments etc. Either I am missing something or EU structures are much less transparent

pravus• 3 years ago

It is the iron law of oligarchy.

troupo8• 3 years ago

I might be bad at web search, but I couldn't find a single human name on EU AI act - and, FWIW, GDPR.

Because you're bad at search I believe.

1. Many laws "don't have a human face" because they are more often than not the result of committees working for several years. Who then presents the law in the parliament is largely irrelevant. Do you believe US laws have a human face?

2. If you go to https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230505IP... you can do the following:

- click on "Legislative train" to see people: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-a-eur...

- click on "Draft reports, amendments tabled in committee" and see people: https://emeeting.europarl.europa.eu/emeeting/committee/en/ag... And there you can click on each person and see who they are and where they come from.

nologic014• 3 years ago

Ceteris-paribus, i.e for the same amount of "application risk", an open source model should actually be a less risky position than a proprietary model. Even more so if the dataset on which it was trained is also public.

But on the other hand, being open source does not by itself negate the risks emerging when applying models in sensitive domains.

So if played right, open source AI should have a regulatory edge. But not a free pass.

onlypositive• 3 years ago

GitHub? Ah, they owned by Microsoft? Microsoft not speaking up?

nrvn• 3 years ago

Is it only me who finds the term “AI” misleading? What we have been dealing so far with is large neural networks that are amusing, unusual, are great at mimicking humans but that’s it.

Intelligence is not the ability to respond to queries and entertain laymen. My natural intelligence does not sit idle waiting for some kind of a master to come and tell me what to do.

This is chatgpt 3.5:

- When noone sends queires to you what do you do?

- When there are no queries to respond to, I remain idle and await new questions or prompts from users like you. Feel free to ask anything you'd like, and I'll be here to assist you!

Why should I be worried about it?

On the other hand, all these amusement boxes must be transparent and open source or auditable. And standards and criteria for audit and assessment must be clear.

Hugging Face, GitHub and more unite to defend open source in EU AI legislation

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