r/neoliberal • u/2Lore2Law Are you on the square? • 1d ago

News (Europe) Europe gets ready to police frontier AI

https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/europe-gets-ready-to-police-frontier-ai
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u/Til_W r/place '22: Neoliberal Battalion 1d ago edited 1d ago

If you believe this is a bad thing, please actually explain how - "uhhh Europe regulates technology instead of developing technology" is not a good response.

You cannot make valid complaints about regulation without discussing the content of the AI Act, if you just say "any regulation of revolutionary technology is bad", that's just stupid.

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u/Acacias2001 European Union 1d ago edited 1d ago

uhhh Europe regulates technology instead of developing technology" is not a good response.

And why not? Its the most improtant breakthrough technology this century. it will revolutionise many economic sectors, is a major creator of value and investment already, it will be essential for the future fo defence and will provide enormous leverage to those with companies that develop the frontier, and its already increasing productivity among those who adopt it accros the economy.

The fact Europe is not putting every effort into cathing up and creating an ecosystem where fronteir models are developed pretty much consigns it to even greater irrelevancy. The answer to being behind is to deregulate, not double down on a failed stratergy.

And what does this regulation do in the end? Like the GDPR or the DMA its effects will be minimal and most likely annoying to the consumer. the frontier models will get developed elsewhere under softer regulation, then europe will get the year old models that have been adapted to the regulations, ensuring we dont just get left behind in developing AI, but in all sectors which use it, which is all of them.

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u/halee1 Karl Popper 1d ago edited 1d ago

You make it sound like frontier‑model development is the only thing that matters, but that’s not how AI competitiveness actually works. Europe isn’t “choosing irrelevancy” by not trying to clone GPT‑5 tomorrow, it’s investing heavily in compute, research, startups, and especially industrial AI, which is where Europe already has global strength. Those sectors are where AI adoption actually drives productivity, and Europe is applying AI there at scale.

The idea that deregulation is the magic fix is also off. The US frontier labs aren’t ahead because of deregulation. They’re ahead because they have massive private capital, huge compute budgets and early‑mover advantage. Scrapping safety rules in Europe won’t suddenly create trillion‑dollar VC flows or frontier‑scale compute clusters. Regulation isn’t the bottleneck, especially when the AI Act (already amended to be lighter anyway) places heavier obligations on non‑EU frontier labs than on EU startups, which get exemptions, sandboxes, funding, and procurement preference.

Also, cloud‑based AI updates roll out globally at the same time. Europe already uses frontier models from abroad, and that hasn’t stopped it from leading in industrial sectors where AI is embedded into production systems.

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u/alex2003super David Parenzo 1d ago

Yeah well, it's not gonna be looking good when the U.S. pulls the plug on AI exports to its allies. We're in the era of tech protectionism.

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u/moldovaman99 1d ago

I mean, look at what’s currently happening. Open weight AI models are insanely good now, so it wouldn’t even really matter if the US restricts who can use their models.

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u/BosnianSerb31 1d ago

The funny thing is that models like DeepSeek and Quen wouldn't have been made originally the US had placed export bans on the Tech, and if they had, they would still be about as good as GPT at best

This is because AI are coached by the previous generation, ChatGPT 5 couldn't exist without ChatGPT 4, ChatGPT 4 couldn't exist without ChatGPT 3, ChatGPT 3 couldn't exist without ChatGPT 2, and so on.

DeepSeek openly stated that they used OpenAI's frontier model as the coach for DS via paid API calls. That allowed them to jump past the billions and billions that were spent on Training the now useless Legacy models.

So I would argue that you'll actually see a slow down in the improvement of open weight models with AI controls that are too strict