“We will bring a multimodal Llama model to market in the coming months, but not in the EU because the European regulatory environment is unpredictable,” says a spokesperson for Meta Heise Online. Reports had previously suggested that Meta was taking this step. Meta AI, which includes most of Meta’s AI applications, is not yet available in the EU. It is not entirely clear whether these are uncertainties arising from the AI Act, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) or the GDPR.
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In the European Union, the AI Act was recently published in the official gazette. This means that it will now be applied with different deadlines. From February 2025, a ban on certain, particularly risky AI applications, such as real-time biometric monitoring, remote identification systems and so-called social scoring, will come into force. Six months later, the rules for GPAIM – general purpose AI models, which includes ChatGPT and Co. – as well as for high-risk applications come into effect. There are critics who say that the AI Act is too vague. But it does not prohibit chatbots or multimodal models in any way.
Apple also cites regulatory uncertainties in the EU – and is therefore unlikely to bring Apple Intelligence to market at the moment. However, they cite DMA as the reason. Here too, it is not clear why exactly AI services should violate the regulation.
The background to Meta’s decision may also be GDPR. This includes training data for AI models. Meta recently changed its terms of service worldwide. This means that all public posts from people using Facebook, Threads and Instagram can be freely used for Meta’s AI training. This also includes, for example, publicly posted photos to be included in AI models. In the EU you could initially object. This form of opt-out attracted the attention of data protection experts, who said it did not comply with local data protection laws. Meta then reversed the changes – initially no data from EU users would flow into training.
Meta’s multimodal model is intended to be integrated into a variety of products – including Ray Ban’s smartglasses. These will then be at most half as smart in the EU. So far, Meta has released its Llama model as open source. If there are any restrictions for the EU, the model cannot be used anyway.
It is unclear whether the multimodal model is the one that has already been speculated to be published. Meta is expected to release a version of Llama 3 with 400 billion parameters this week.
(EMW)
