Meta, Ericsson, and many others sign open letter to EU over AI regulation

The open letter was coordinated by Meta, which managed to persuade Ericsson, SAP, Spotify and over 50 other companies to give it their seal of approval. It was published as an ad in the FT, which you can see a copy of below. It essentially argues that Europe’s excessive bureaucracy and characteristic lack of urgency on regulating AI means its companies risk falling behind other regions in seizing the opportunities presented by it.

“Europe has become less competitive and less innovative compared to other regions and it now risks falling further behind in the AI era due to inconsistent regulatory decision making,” says the letter. It goes on to highlight a couple of specific areas that most keep the signatories awake at night.

“The first are developments in ‘open’ models that are made available without charge for everyone to use, modify and build on, multiplying the benefits and spreading social and economic opportunity,” says the letter. “Open models strengthen sovereignty and control by allowing organisations to download and fine-tune the models wherever they want, removing the need to send their data elsewhere.

“The second are the latest ‘multimodal’ models, which operate fluidly across text, images and speech and will enable the next leap forward in AI. The difference between text-only models and multimodal is like the difference between having only one sense and having all five of them. Frontier-level open models - based on text or multimodal - can turbocharge productivity, drive scientific research and add hundreds of billions of euros to the European economy.”

After labouring the point for a few more paragraphs, the letter cuts to the chase. On top of the standard European regulatory soup, it laments the uncertainty around what data can be used to train AI models created from interventions by the European Data Protection Authorities. That, in turn, will mean those LLMs won’t have Europe-specific training.

“…we need harmonised, consistent, quick and clear decisions under EU data regulations that enable European data to be used in AI training for the benefit of Europeans,” concludes the letter. “Decisive action is needed to help unlock the creativity, ingenuity and entrepreneurialism that will ensure Europe’s prosperity, growth and technical leadership.”

While the usual criticisms of the EU’s bloated, complacent mega-bureaucracy are valid, this letter concerns the essence of the regulatory dilemma – balancing consumer protection with the obstruction of commercial activity. The European Commission sometimes seems to take pleasure in imposing its will on the private sector just because it can and alarm bells are increasingly being rung about the region’s competitiveness.

Maybe the new lot of senior European commissioners will be a bit less megalomaniacal than their predecessors and less inclined to constantly make themselves the story. It’s probably not a coincidence that this letter has been published immediately after their appointment and it suggests that pressure on the EU to just get out of the way will only intensify.