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Debates

Does regulation, especially in Europe, risk stifling AI progress by regulating too comprehensively?

7 recorded positions from 4 people, first said May 17, 2023. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.

Comprehensive european style regulation risks stifling ai progress

Emad Mostaque · May 17, 2023

Europe most needs to change its AI regulation and policy approach

They are going to regulate all innovation out of Europe rather than embrace the technology to drive themselves forward

61:44 20VC: Why the AI Bubble Will Be Bigger Than The Dot Com Bubble, Why AI Will Have a Bigger Impact Than COVID, Why No Models Used Today Will Be Used in a Year, Why All Models are Biased and How AI Kills Traditional Media with Emad Mostaque, Founder & CEO @

Alex Lebrun · Jun 19, 2023

The new EU AI regulation is a disaster because, as written, essentially every large language model trained in the last three years would be illegal in Europe

The limits it puts on how a model may be trained and operated are disconnected from how models are actually built and run today, so in practice it makes everything illegal

Scope: concedes the regulatory intent is good

0:00 20VC: Why No Models Today Will Be Used in a Year, Why Open Will Always Beat Closed in AI, Why Proprietary Data is Less Important Than Ever And Why EU AI Regulation is a Disaster with Alex Lebrun, Founder & CEO @ Nabla

Alex Lebrun · Jun 19, 2023

The regulation's requirement that you be accountable for licensing and explicit consent for all training data would in practice make hundreds of LLMs trained in the last three years illegal in Europe

The intent is good and nobody would disagree with it in principle, but the limits it puts on how models are trained and operated are disconnected from how models are actually built today

Scope: describing the requirement 'simply'/approximately

43:46 20VC: Why No Models Today Will Be Used in a Year, Why Open Will Always Beat Closed in AI, Why Proprietary Data is Less Important Than Ever And Why EU AI Regulation is a Disaster with Alex Lebrun, Founder & CEO @ Nabla

Douwe Kiela · Jun 30, 2023

The main regulatory risk is that Europe overregulates AI and destroys innovation, while the US has traditionally been better at letting innovation thrive.

People who write regulation generally don't understand technology, and nobody benefits from overregulation except incumbents who are already lobbying for it.

26:41 20VC: Why Data Size Matters More Than Model Size, Why The Google Employee Was Wrong; OpenAI and Google Have the Advantage & Why Open Source is Not Going to Win with Douwe Kiela, Co-Founder @ Contextual AI

Douwe Kiela · Jun 30, 2023

The EU tends to kill innovation because it believes it can lead through regulation, and if it continues there will be nothing left in Europe to regulate.

Regulation is the only thing the EU is really good at.

27:59 20VC: Why Data Size Matters More Than Model Size, Why The Google Employee Was Wrong; OpenAI and Google Have the Advantage & Why Open Source is Not Going to Win with Douwe Kiela, Co-Founder @ Contextual AI

Harry Stebbings · Jun 10, 2024

Regulation, especially in Europe, is a serious risk of stifling AI progress by regulating every element

Europe's particular skill is regulation

45:46 20VC: Reid Hoffman on Foundation Models: Who Wins & How Do Incumbents Respond | The Inflection AI Deal: How it Went Down | Why Trump is a Threat to Democracy | The Future of TikTok | Lessons from Sam Altman, Brian Chesky and the OpenAI Board

Also on the record

Alex Lebrun · Jun 19, 2023

Europe is roughly ten years behind the US and China in AI, and the new EU regulation will push it much further behind

43:15 Europe is already a decade behind and new regulation widens the gap further

Your assistant can query this graph directly — 7 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.