Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman Voice Backing for European Union Rules on Artificial Intelligence
Following talks with Thierry Breton of the European Commission, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, executives of a technology company, have voiced their backing for government regulation of artificial intelligence.
The commissioner said on Friday that he and Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta Platforms Inc, were “in agreement” on the EU’s AI regulation, which is now in final negotiations. They agreed on a risk-based approach to the bloc and measures such as watermarking, Breton said.
OpenAI CEO Altman also said he agreed with the EU’s approach to AI, adding “I really appreciate the European institution here and the foresight to take this issue so seriously, also for the rest of the world.”
“We look forward to working with you to be timely and provide a European service in line with the European market,” Altman told Breton. OpenAI developed the popular chatbot ChatGPT, which has sparked a lot of interest in the potential of generative artificial intelligence, a technology that produces text or images in response to user prompts.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s head of global affairs, said his company “shared our support for the goals of the AI agreement. While we need to explore the details, we understand the importance of technology companies being open about their work on AI and working collaboratively between industry, governments and civil society.
Friday’s talks were part of Breton’s tour of tech companies this week. After Meta’s visit, Breton said the Facebook and Instagram owner appears well-prepared to meet Europe’s tough new content control rules, but will submit to a stress test of its systems next month.
Meta presented “a lot of information” about its work to comply with the European Union’s digital services law, but was happy to do a stress test “so we don’t forget anything,” he said.
Zuckerberg agreed in mid-July to test how the company handles content moderation rules. Breton said Meta has about 1,000 people working on DSA implementation.
Meta’s CEO was interested in the upcoming test of how the company’s platforms will handle the competition rules set by the EU Digital Market Act. Companies must self-report as gatekeepers on certain platform services on July 3.
Breton also said he urged Zuckerberg to increase resources to fight disinformation, particularly Russian disinformation in Eastern European countries about the war in Ukraine. And he discussed a Wall Street Journal report about child predators targeting children on the Instagram photo-sharing site Meta.
Clegg called it a “constructive” discussion in a tweet. “We have invited his team to our Dublin campus to see how we stress test our processes before deployment,” he said.
Breton discussed AI separately with Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia Corp., the world’s most valuable chipmaker, which leads the market in delivering AI processors. After the session, Huang told reporters that it was “very likely” that Nvidia would invest in Europe.
On Thursday, Breton met with Twitter owner Elon Musk and new CEO Linda Yaccarino and told reporters that the social media site must devote more resources to handling sensitive content if it wants to comply with EU rules before an August deadline.
