Yeah. Fortunately Germany has a quite firm stance against surveilance, for well known reasons ;), and with Germany against it will be extremely difficult to pass this.
Not so sure about that. We have enough politicians here, who don't know shit about technology, or want to seem like they don't and will gladly hold the hand open to be bought by forces, who would like nothing more than get their hands on all that data.
They handicap our little companies more than the incumbents. The Commission itself acknowledged that regulatory costs affect SMEs proportionally more than bigger competitors [0] and the OECD explicitly found that policy failures and regulatory barriers tend to hurt startups more than incumbents [1][2]. The way I see the broader pattern is: more regulation -> larger bureaucracy -> larger bureaucracy has more scope and more incentive to regulate -> incumbent absorb growing compliance burden easily -> entrants get hit harder + ad-hoc regulations to hurt established outsiders even harder.
[2] OECD, about Germany 2025, e.g.: 'Industrial and labour market policies have tended to favour incumbents and hampered the reallocation of resources to young and innovative
firms, weighing on allocative efficiency and slowing down structural change' (https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...)
At least in Poland the requirements before GDPR was the same for small startups and for large enterprises. If you wanted to set up a newsletter for a bunch of friends you had to do, technically, the same requirements and reports as the large telcos.
The only way to manage it was to effectively ignore it. I’ve met people who were afraid of setting up a landing page because you technically had to fill in paperwork and whatnot.
Ditto managing VAT across the borders and a bunch of other stuff.
It is better now in some ways - I think some newer regulations had it written down that they apply above a certain turnover threshold. We also we have saas-es to deal with a lot of beauricratic bs, and now also agents.
But I imagine for more human/real-world stuff the issues can’t be overcome with tech. E.g. if you hire a 4th team member and that person immediately goes into months-long health/birth timeout, it can derail a whole project. We barely avoided that once - didn’t hire a person due to culture fit, but we later suspected they planned to take a leave shortly after getting hired. It’s a common thing in bigger corps but they can afford it.
As a side note, in Poland used to have a lot of such BS, but our general culture is about hacking around it.
For example it’s common for smaller companies to have employees „self employed” to avoid most of regulatory burden of hiring, whereas the bigger companies need to have employees actually employed with all the legal consequences. Technically anyone can get audited but below 20-50 people the government won’t bother, so it balances itself out.
Germany is another animal altogether - the last time I was doing business there you couldn’t even theoretically open a new company at all because they had a catch 22. To open a company you had to have a bank account to pay the notary, and to open an account you had to have a company. And either the notary or the bank had to blink.
What? I I’m in Europe and I use e2ee daily. The reason you hear about this imho is that we have strong protections and you hear when someone tries to break them.
Climate change for one, civil unrest due to a growing societal divide, end of antibiotics… A bunch of dangers we are facing right now and that AGI stands a chance of solving. It can increase the problem as well, but any discussion should really be between „is the world more likely to die with or without AGI”, and not just „with AGI”.
Or, in other words, sure, crossing this chasm is dangerous, but this side is on fire anyway and we don’t have many ways out otherwise.
P(doom) for not making an ASI is pretty well established, I'm not really sure why everyone in the 21st century seems to have completely forgotten the risk of nuclear war (as the single largest example).
Climate change is one risk that AGI will most likely fix. End of antibiotics is another (sure, possibly offset by a risk of new bioweapons). And a bunch of others where it’s more complicated.
But that’s my point - we should compare the risks of having AGI with the risks of not having it. And not pretend it’s roses or rainbows without it.
Prosperity inhibits all war, nuclear or otherwise.
Why would a person who is happy, entertained, wealthy, well fed, and have 200 years of healthy high quality life expected ahead of them going to risk losing what they have in war?
-- there aren't zero reasons, sure-- but there are fewer.
And our technology has brought us absolutely tremendous prosperity in many regards and there is good reason to believe that AI can help create much more.
You do realize that the people currently holding their fingers over the proverbial Big Red Button are some of the wealthiest, most over-privileged people to have ever lived?
'Prosperity' has never been and will never be enough for some people. And unfortunately those are the same kinds of people who relentlessly seek power.
The comment was unclear, but my interpretation (also my opinion):
1) there are inherent risks involved with developing AI,
2) there are benefits to developing AI,
3) thus, it's entirely possible that the downside from the risks outweighs the upsides. In this case, the correct thing to do would be to not develop AI at all.
Regarding 1), there are many non-existential problems with AI that are already causing societal harm, i.e. debasing truth via generated videos and images, AI girlfriends, overwhelming quantities of slop content, unemployment, record carbon emissions, etc.
Regarding 2), I'm not personally convinced that the upside is there for the average person. I really hope to be convinced otherwise however.
No I'm saying this entire problem approach, including memory system of agents, is incorrect. Like the author argues. With the same solution of moving the ground truths outside of the model/context.
Most people host their data on cloud anyway. Once you turn off training there is no difference to storing data with OpenAI/Anthropic vs Google or Meta.
They don’t need to, and it would be too risky and too difficult to keep such a conspiracy going.
And also, what’s your story here? That they don’t delete the data they agree to delete, and stash it secretly somewhere? And that they have programs that are mire secretive tan NSA’s inside that secretly finetunes algorithms on such data?
They would expose themselves to lawsuits that would crush their companies, even with such absurd valuations? And possibly risking jail time of the top people? GDPR offences in certain countries are punishable by up to two years in prison. And with a such blatant violation at least in EU the maximum sentences would most likely be given.
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