On Thursday, the European Union published its first draft of a Code of Practice for general purpose AI (GPAI) models. The document, which won't be finalized until May, lays out guidelines for managing risks -- and giving companies a blueprint to comply and avoid hefty penalties. The EU's AI Act came into force on August 1, but it left room to nail down the specifics of GPAI regulations down the road. This draft (via TechCrunch) is the first attempt to clarify what's expected of those more advanced models, giving stakeholders time to submit feedback and refine them before they kick in. GPAIs are those trained with a total computing power of over 10²⁵ FLOPs. Companies expected to fall under the EU's guidelines include OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic and Mistral.

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies has already transformed business operations across the globe. From customer service chat-bots to adaptive cybersecurity, the applications of AI are nearly limitless. When properly designed, AI can help minimize paperwork, reduce costs, and drive better business decisions by increasing the predictive accuracy of future outcomes and mitigating the cognitive biases inherent in human decision making. In the financial services industry, AI has the potential to expand access to affordable credit for consumers and small businesses and combat fraud and financial crimes, but many financial institutions remain reluctant to deploy AI to its maximum potential without clear guidance from US regulatory agencies. Like many new technologies, the current AI landscape lacks a depth of established legal and regulatory precedent to rely on.

In the early to mid-90's while my friends were getting into Indie Rock, I was hacking away at robots and getting them to learn to map a room. A computer science graduate student, I programmed LISP algorithms for parsing nursing records in order to predict intervention codes. I was no less a nerd (or to put it a better way, a technology enthusiast) in law school, when I wrote about how natural language processing can improve legal research tools. I didn't put much thought, either as a computer scientist or law student to whether artificial intelligence (AI) should be regulated. Frankly, we were in such the early days of the technology, that AI regulations seemed like science fiction a la Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics.