What happens next? This doesn’t mean the EU goes to adopt these policies outright. Next, members of the European Parliament may have to thrash out details with the Council of the European Union and the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, before the draft rules change into law. The ultimate laws will probably be a compromise between three different drafts from the three institutions. European lawmakers are aiming to get the AI Act in final shape by December, and the regulation must be in force by 2026. 

You possibly can read my previous piece on the AI Act here.

Bits and Bytes

A fight over facial recognition will make or break the AI Act
Whether to ban the usage of facial recognition software in public places will probably be the largest fight in the ultimate negotiations for the AI Act. Members of the European Parliament want a whole ban on the technology, while EU countries want the liberty to make use of it in policing. (Politico)

AI researchers sign a letter calling for give attention to current AI harms
One other open letter! This one comes from AI researchers on the ACM conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), calling on policymakers to make use of existing tools to “design, audit, or resist AI systems to guard democracy, social justice, and human rights.” Signatories include Alondra Nelson and Suresh Venkatasubramanian, who wrote the White House’s AI Bill of Rights.

The UK desires to be a world hub for AI regulation
The UK’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, pitched his country as the worldwide home of artificial-intelligence regulation. Sunak’s hope is that the UK could offer a “third way” between the EU’s AI Act and the US’s Wild West. Sunak is hosting a AI regulation summit in London in the autumn. I’m skeptical. The UK can try, but ultimately its AI corporations will probably be forced to comply with the EU’s AI Act in the event that they wish to do business within the influential trading bloc. (Time) 

YouTube could give Google an edge in AI
Google has been tapping into the wealthy video repository of its video site YouTube to coach its next large language model. This material could help Google train a model that may generate not only text but audio and video too. Apparently this is just not lost on OpenAI, which has been secretly using YouTube data to coach its AI models. (The Information) 

A four-week-old AI startup raised €105 million
Speak about AI hype. Mistral, a brand-new French AI startup with no products and barely any employees, has managed to lift €105 million in Europe’s largest-ever seed round. The founders of the corporate previously worked at DeepMind and Meta. Two of them were behind the team that developed Meta’s open-source Llama language model. (Financial Times)