EU Adaptable Regulations for General Purpose AIs: Evolving Rules for the Future

EU lawmakers clinched a deal late Friday over what the bloc is billing as the world’s first comprehensive law for regulating artificial intelligence. The deal includes powers for the Commission to adapt the pan-EU AI rulebook to keep pace with developments in the cutting edge field, it has confirmed. The term “general purpose” AI models and systems is favored over industry terms like “foundational” or “frontier” models to avoid a classification that could be chained to use of a specific technology (i.e. transformer based machine learning). The deal agreed by the bloc’s co-legislators includes a low risk tier and a high risk tier for regulating so-called general purpose AIs (GPAIs) such as models behind the viral boom in generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The threshold set for high risk rules to apply on generative AI technologies is determined at 10^25 FLOPs. The AI Office, which will play a key role in setting risk classification thresholds for GPAIs, has no budget nor headcount defined as yet. The EU’s executive will decide resourcing in the future. The AI Office will work in conjunction with a scientific advisory panel to aid the body in understanding the capabilities of advanced AI models for the purposes of regulating systemic risk. The incoming law must be put out there in spite of there being no final text yet. It is worth scrutinizing the text that emerges for potential hidden details. Additionally, while …