Why EXACTLY this model is not available in Europe?
I would like to know why EXACTLY this model is not available in Europe, while all the other major vision models are. So my question is - could you tell us which SPECIFIC laws (legal act, article, paragraph, decision) are prohibiting you from making this model available in Europe? I am very curious what laws and/or decisions apply only to Meta vision models.
You are aware that this stupid regulation can be bypassed with a VPN?
You are aware that this stupid regulation can be bypassed with a VPN?
I know this limitation can be worked around. But I'd still want to know what are real reasons for that decision.
For now only justification I can see is that Meta trained this model on people private / personal data without having their consent (which is illegal in the EU), and they don't want to fined for that - so they try to avoid responsibility for doing so by using article 3 of GDPR, and not offering this model in the EU.
When I hear BS narrative about "unpredictable" or "fragmented" regulations on the https://euneedsai.com/ page they've linked in their announcement post it only strengthen my suspicions (cause in reality GDPR is stable and EU-wide regulation, that is directly applicable in every EU country since 2016 - and so will be AI Act, starting February 2025). None of those regulations prevents training AI models on public and legally obtained data, or publishing them.
I'm just another user like you, but as far as I understand, there's nothing preventing them from releasing these models.
Probably this is just retaliation because they wanted to train on private user data, and the EU said: no, you can only do this if users opt-in explicitly. And now Meta is retaliating in response.
If an official spokesperson from Meta can provide more insights into this or correct this, I would also be interested to hear the details.
I'm not sure if they actually trained on private data or not - it might be the case that if they did, they could still be fined even if they don't release it.
There is no reason a vision language model should not be released in the EU: the recent Qwen vision models are available worldwide and Pixtral is released by an EU company, even with these EU regulations. That said, Meta has already been fined by EU so it might be a retaliatory measure.
By making the models not available in the EU, Meta tries to avoid liability and puts it on the importer instead.
But as said above, circumvention of the restriction is not that difficult and there are already non-gated reuploads of these vision models.