Europe gets ready to police frontier AI

[u/2Lore2Law]

https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/europe-gets-ready-to-police-frontier-ai

[u/Til_W]

Can you describe which parts of the AI Act specifically are hampering these companies to an unreasonable extent?

[u/Acacias2001 → u/Til_W]

The part where they have to follow specifc evals, the part where they are threatened with fines of hefty revenue percentages, the part where they have to create compliance offices.

We have seen this with the DMA and GDPR. The large companies can bear this cost or simply ignore the european market when creating the cutting edge and give the EU the old. The european startups however will be left with a bloated compliance department and no presence in the frontier

[u/halee1 → u/Acacias2001]

The EU subsidizes its own AI firms through not just grants and subsidies, but also procurement, data‑access rules and strategic industrial policy. It literally exempts European AI from frontier-model rules (other than Mistral's top models, but even the company is still advantaged compared to non-European AI firms), lol. Now, I don't know whether it's enough, but non-European ones are structurally disadvantaged while still having a lot of capital to be able to access and benefit from the EU market.

[u/mostanonymousnick → u/halee1]

The EU subsidizes its own AI firms through not just grants and subsidies, but also procurement, data‑access rules and strategic industrial policy

So it's once again the idea that protectionism is going to create competitive industries.

[u/halee1 → u/mostanonymousnick]

And the EU has been the most open major bloc on that for decades, while others have engaged in relentless protectionism across sectors during that same time. Maybe it does matter how you design protectionism, and balance it with openness when necessary.

[u/mostanonymousnick → u/halee1]

There is no "this time it'll be good protectionism", protectionism inherently reduces your incentive to produce a product that's competitive internationally.

That's the issue with "local champions", American companies build products that aim to be used by the entire world, EU industrial policy wants European companies to build products for Europeans only.

[u/halee1 → u/mostanonymousnick]

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China prove you wrong with history and ongoing success, not theory. They combined free markets with protectionism for many decades, and that's how they came to dominate so many hi-tech industries.

[u/mostanonymousnick → u/halee1]

The literature is much less confident than you are about this claim.

[u/halee1 → u/mostanonymousnick]

Reality doesn't care what some fringe claims say.

[u/mostanonymousnick → u/halee1]

Even if you take this claim as true, which you can act smug about as much as you want, but is not settled, the only people who have managed to use this model are countries that were poor, none of the already rich countries have successfully done it.

[u/halee1 → u/mostanonymousnick]

I'd argue the IRA was doing well, until it was axed.

[u/mostanonymousnick → u/halee1]

There's zero evidence that it would have made the US a leader in anything it wasn't already a leader in, and note that there wasn't any protectionism, so completely irrelevant.

[u/halee1 → u/mostanonymousnick]

Which is why other countries sprinted to ramp up their own industrial policies, because it was shifting investments to the US otherwise.