How regulating AI too early risks freezing the EU in the past

I've started writing for The Currency

I've begun writing as an "AI columnist" at The Currency (and I realise you can read that two ways 😂). Actually it was a reader, and subscriber, to this blog that suggested I aim to get more reach for some of my writing - so thanks for that encouragement!

The Currency is well read and respected in the business community in Ireland, and increasingly gaining a foothold in the UK.

This is my first piece: "How regulating AI too early risks freezing the EU in the past"

I argue European AI policy is preemptive, limiting entrepreneurs’ access to the latest technology. And sometimes it’s best to wait just a little and see how society responds to innovation.

Here's an excerpt on the EU having delayed access to certain AI products:

"I had a maths teacher in secondary school who would remark how “a short pencil is better than a long memory”. Recently, ChatGPT reincarnated this pencil in its modern form, allowing users to reference any of their saved conversation history in a new chat. This addresses a major gap in large-language-model interfaces today, namely, that they have no recollection of your past interactions. While this feature is available in the US, it is not yet available within the EU while data protection impacts are being assessed under GDPR."

And why a preemptive approach to AI regulation can be ineffective (perhaps like cookies in the privacy act that paralleled GDPR):

"While 2022 and 2023 were all about scaling up the amount of data and compute used for model training, improvements in 2024 were substantially driven by a different approach called “test-time compute”, where answers are improved by generating either much longer answers or generating many answers to the same question in parallel, and then judging the best.

As such, the nature of progress and its impact is not all that easy to predict. This makes it more difficult to regulate preemptively, and more important to regulate empirically, ie based on the responses that are seen in markets and in society."

The full piece is available here for subscribers to The Currency.