Lost opportunity to invest in the Fediverse instead. Open a mastodon account for all European institutions, maybe ask the Countries to do the same for their entities. Mastodon was created in Europe, by the way. Also it’s open source, and this is a huge benefit over Meta/Twitter.
This article makes it look like EU CVP defines “metaverse” as “lol connected stuff I guess” and not as “VRChat by Zucc”.
Which is good.
Still, I wonder if they will take (and contribute to) ThirdRoom or Mozilla Hubs instead of reinventing the wheel when they come to the VR part of their plan.
Since I learned that the EU and Germany have been running official Mastodon servers for a while, and have recently been joined by Netherlands, I’m hopeful that this initiative might be a catalyst for an open and interoperable system. Details are pretty light though in the article, and it sounds like mostly establishing regulations. Still, if those regulations are structured well, there could be an open and interoperable “Metaverse” (whatever that might mean).
So big tech invests billions, and the EU is going to take the lead how exactly?
The scheme includes bringing together creators, media companies and others to create an industrial ecosystem, setting up regulatory sandboxes to help companies test out the metaverse and rolling out skills development programmes as well virtual public services.
They want to carve out a piece of the metaverse for European companies is basically the message. We’ve learned in the past 30 years that large firms dominate different aspects of tech space. Take a look at what they’ve done in aircraft manufacturing - they’ve elbowed into the space that Americans were dominating. Now there’s just 2 - Boeing and Airbus which is theirs. They are going to seek to replicate that, learning from the mistakes in tech in the past.
Boeing and Airbus bought up every competitor to create a duopoly, and Boeing’s 737 MAX issues have hurt them recently
I just don’t see how the EU regulating the metaverse will result in a competitive advantage over the billions that Meta for e.g. have invested in their headsets and software
They bought up the small ones because they were failing. That industry requires huge economies of scale and the smaller ones couldn’t cope. EU created Airbus out of the scrap pieces of dying European aircraft manufacturers and injected capital into it and gave it a captive market. In metaverse they are starting to behave this way - currently Threads isn’t allowed to operate in Europe. They are going to create regulatory barriers around it. Allow European alternatives to grow - i.e. Mastodon, etc. And provide any kind of support - regulatory, capital, incentives, etc. European governments have used their might to create industry giants so that their countries remain relevant and that wealth creation and innovation remains rooted in their countries. It will be the same in this case.
Well that’s just IT. They don’t have a significant presence in the tech space and they are trying to create barriers to develop home grown companies. (To answer your question SAP and some anti-virus companies top of my head but there isn’t a lot.)
Creating barriers isn’t a great way to go about it. Protectionist efforts just get returned with tit for tat exchanges in the exact same way that has happened with aerospace.
Boeing didn’t want competition in the US domestic market. They thought they could squeeze out Bombardier, but weren’t expecting that to come around and have the A220 get sold to Airbus (who are now doing really well with the A220, since the A220 is legitimately a really nice plane).
WASHINGTON, July 11 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge ruled on Tuesday that Microsoft may go forward with its planned acquisition of videogame maker Activision Blizzard, turning aside antitrust enforcers’ request for a preliminary injunction to temporarily stop the $69 billion deal.
The court separately extended its temporary restraining order to July 14 at 11:59 pm to allow the Federal Trade Commission to appeal.
The FTC had originally asked the judge to stop the proposed deal, arguing it would give Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), maker of the Xbox gaming console, exclusive access to Activision (ATVI.O) games including the best-selling “Call of Duty.” The agency’s concern was that the deal would potentially preclude the availability of those videogames on other platforms.
“We are disappointed in this outcome given the clear threat this merger poses to open competition in cloud gaming, subscription services, and consoles. In the coming days we’ll be announcing our next step to continue our fight to preserve competition and protect consumers," said FTC spokesperson Douglas Farrar.
Microsoft shares edged lower and Activision shares were up 5.6%.
In its arguments, the FTC has said Microsoft would be able to use the Activision games to leave rival console makers like Nintendo (7974.T) and market-leader Sony Group (6758.T) out in the cold.
Microsoft President Brad Smith tweeted that the company was “grateful” for the “quick and thorough” decision.
"Our merger will benefit consumers and workers. It will enable competition rather than allow entrenched market leaders to continue to dominate our rapidly growing industry,” Bobby Kotick, Activision Blizzard CEO said in a statement. The FTC complaint cited concerns about loss of competition in console gaming, as well as subscriptions and cloud gaming. To address the FTC’s concerns, Microsoft agreed to license “Call of Duty” to rivals, including a 10-year contract with Nintendo, contingent on the merger closing. During the five-day trial in June, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argued the company would have no incentive to shut out Sony’s PlayStation or other rivals in order to sell more Microsoft Xbox consoles. At issue in the Microsoft-Activision deal is leadership in a gaming market whose sales are expected to increase by 36% over the next four years to $321 billion, according to a PwC estimate. And while much of the testimony in the recent trial focused on “Call of Duty,” Activision produces other bestsellers like “World of Warcraft,” “Diablo” and the mobile game “Candy Crush Saga.” Microsoft’s bid to acquire the videogame maker also faces opposition from Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority, which blocked the takeover in April. An appeal is scheduled for July 28.
The only thing boringdystopia about it is that someone actually wrote that article. LLMs will say anything and everything. They do not really have plans for anything.
I wonder how bad this is going to be. I hope my country starts checking for radioactivity in fish imported. Considering that some fish can travel quite far I wouldn’t be surprised if the ones from anywhere near Japan and close countries could have unsafe levels of radiation.
I read some article last week mentioning that the advanced filtering system for water was practically useless. Hopefully I just understood it wrong.
Great so maybe Japan should use that water for internal consumption then? Obviously they won’t do that, so can’t complain when other countries are uncomfortable with it.
Are you basing that statement on a source or do you have some information on that? Or are you just guessing based on your own emotions, over how you wouldn’t do that(because you do not understand radiation)?
You wouldn’t need scientific proof that most people wouldn’t eat shit either. It’s a reasonable assumption given that after all their analysis, meetings, debates etc their solution is to dump it into the ocean and not for internal consumption. This move is bad for their international pr, so logically if there is a better/more accepted option they would have chose it. Unless you are telling me that this decision is more likely made in vacuum and the decision makers are not very smart.
Yeah, it’s just a popular tactic for politicians to scare people then show that they are working on something to mitigate the “threat”. Immigrants, muslims, the jew, the non believers, the radiation (but not the pollution bcs it is a money maker) etc etc
Because it’s their work being used algorithmically to support someone else’s.
Regardless of how you feel about AI, the training models have to exclude copyrighted works to not have this happen, because otherwise it is absolutely true that that AI keeps record of everything fed into it, and if you dont have the rights to what was fed into it, then there’s a copyright issue. Because even if it’s being reworked and influenced by other works, it is still using other people’s stuff to do it. It is, in many ways, an overgrown randomization & automation tool.
The problem is that people dont see AI’s as a tool that companies are using, they see it almost like a person learning. It’s not like a person learning, and cant be treated the same as say, a consumer reading the book referenced (in this example) for enjoyment.
If I went to an acting class to be trained to act like robert de niro and they used multiple facets of his work over the years to train me, is it infringement? If I go to an art class to learn how to paint like Picasso, and they use his work as reference, is that infringement? In these examples I'm the AI and the class is essentially the trainer. I get that the company is setting up the AI to be a product, but in these examples, I too would be setting myself to be a product if I use my new skills to profit.
All of the litigation isn't necessarily wrong, so far, but AI is happening much too quickly for it to matter. And what's more human, the thing the companies creating new AI are going for, than learning from our arts, languages, culture, etc.?
it is absolutely true that that AI keeps record of everything fed into it
No it isn’t.
A properly trained deep learning system will ultimately far smaller than all of the data it’s been trained on. It’s simply impossible for it to have retained a record of very much of it at all.
When everything is working correctly it shouldn’t have any of the actual text stored at all. Certainly every single piece of training data will have left some impression on the model, but that’s a very long way from actually storing the training data. The model consists of statistical relationships, not a copy-paste of the inputs.
Strictly speaking there is something resembling text in the model, but it’s made up of the smallest possible units of language (unless there’s been overfitting, in which case the training has gone wrong and there probably would be a case to answer).
The model builds sentances from a list of “phrases” which don’t even need to line up with word boundaries. Things like “is a” might be treated as a “word”, as might “ing”, if the model finds that to be a useful snippet.
reuters.com
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