Hmm, for a moment I thought there must be an error in the title and it should be "Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Leave the EU If There's ISN'T Any Real AI Regulation"
But no, He is in front of US congress arguing for regulation, he is in the EU arguing against regulation.
It's pretty obvious he's after whatever (de)regulation supports his business model. But I guess that's just his job.
Let's hope regulators don't forget it is their job to represent the people's interests... I mean, whatever those may be in this case, I'm not claiming it's easy, I'm just claiming that Sam may not be the person to have the people's interests at the top of his list.
The real take away is that he’s out front shaping regulation before it impacts him.
In the US he knows it’s easy to manipulate our policy with a little song and dance because our policy makers don’t understand what they are looking at.
It’s a different story in the EU where you have competent leaders.
That seems to be the reason for the inverse approach.
US: “let me help you write the regulations ;)”
EU: “you’re gonna be behind it you regulate me :0”
As a EU citizen, I really wish we had competent leaders, particularly in Brussels. Have never seen any evidence that is the case, specially with regards to tech.
The last EU initiative at sweeping regulation in the tech space (GDPR) was disastrous. It imposed huge compliance costs for all entities, from large multinationals to small startups and business and even some individuals and nonprofits. For the multinationals that is totally fine with me, they can afford it, but for the other ones it is far from clear that the benefits outweigh the costs. They could have just made it not apply to small entities (either in revenue, number of users or some other metric) and it would have been arguably great. The way they did it they just gave a big advantage to large incumbents and put a strong handicap on EU based tech start ups (as well as other businesses to a lesser extent).
Years after the roll out, I still occasionally come across international websites that have opted to ban European visitors than figure out how to comply with GDPR.
Don't get me wrong, the GDPR was meant to address real on going abuses of personal data, and did some things right, but it could have easily had most of the benefits for a fraction of the cost if they did things right. Unfortunately, like all almost all regulators, Brussels tends to pay a lot more attention to hypothetical benefits of regulation than its predictable costs.
I agree, there are some stupid bureaucratic loop holes, i.e., Find a public data set without consents which you want to use. This is not allowed, but this is what you can do:
* Try to contact owner of data to ask for consent of all people (maybe thousands)
* They ignore you because it's an insane task to arrange all those consents...but...
* Now you have shown that you did a reasonable effort to obtain consent and...
* Now you can use the data for research purposes.
You can't use it for making/creating anything related to IP though. But you can get creative of course.
But no, He is in front of US congress arguing for regulation, he is in the EU arguing against regulation.
It's pretty obvious he's after whatever (de)regulation supports his business model. But I guess that's just his job.
Let's hope regulators don't forget it is their job to represent the people's interests... I mean, whatever those may be in this case, I'm not claiming it's easy, I'm just claiming that Sam may not be the person to have the people's interests at the top of his list.