>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.
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.
https://llama3.replicate.dev/
Or run a jupyter notebook from Unsloth on Colab
https://huggingface.co/unsloth/llama-3-8b-bnb-4bit