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It's time for European Union regulators to embrace open source AI — or at least that's the position Meta head Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek made clear in a co-authored article.
The roughly 1,000-word article was published in The Economist earlier this week and was posted on the relevant publications' websites today.
Mr Ek's decision to work with Mr Zuckerberg here is perhaps surprising, given that only last year EU authorities ordered Mehta to pay a record fine. The Stockholm-born Mr Ek would have been unlikely to work with Spotify's rival Apple.
Indeed, Apple is already facing various investigations and potentially even hefty fines from the EU for “abusing its dominant market position in the distribution of music streaming apps.”
And despite Google appearing to have an overall good relationship with Spotify, it is reportedly providing custom microchips to Apple as part of the AI training process for iPhone developers.
Either way, it's Zuckerberg and Ek who are pleading with EU regulators and lawmakers to embrace open source, which they believe is “the best vehicle for leveraging AI to spur progress and create economic opportunity and security for all.”
Meta is now “open sourcing much of its AI technology,” according to executives, and Europe is said to be “particularly well-positioned to make the most of open source AI.” But Ek and Zuckerberg said Europe's “fragmented regulatory structure is rife with inconsistent implementations, stifling innovation and holding back developers.”
“Instead of clear rules informing and guiding how companies do business across the continent, our industries face overlapping regulations and inconsistent guidance on how to comply with them,” the duo elaborated in a meta-specific section. “Without urgent change, European businesses, academia and others risk missing out on the next wave of tech investment and economic growth opportunities.”
From there, the authors point out the perceived “uneven application” of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation measures, and ultimately push for the development of “thoughtful, clear and consistent” AI guidelines.
While time will tell whether their publicly stated position will bring about change in the EU (Ek's holdings (and AI shares) go far beyond Spotify, giving them considerable influence in the sector), executives also cited the benefits that open source AI could bring to their business.
Regarding Spotify, Daniel Ek wrote that its early investments in AI laid the foundation for its personalization success and “shaped the company into what it is today,” highlighting the “huge potential to leverage open-source AI to benefit the industry” going forward.
This enormous potential, according to the text, is to help “more artists get discovered.” Needless to say, Spotify’s interest in enabling a favorable AI regulatory environment doesn’t start and end with helping artists.
But the remarks raise the question of whether AI could drive even more discovery in the coming years: At Spotify itself, services like AI DJ have been well-received overall, and there's no doubt that the technology is also driving a fair amount of discovery on TikTok, for example.
