Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc delayed its launch of the Meta artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot in Europe after regulators on the continent requested that the company pause its plan to train its large language models with posts from users there.
On Monday last week, Meta announced its intention to start training its large language model, called Llama, using public posts generated by European users.
On Friday, it updated that statement to say those plans have been delayed indefinitely after the Irish Data Protection Commission pushed back on the decision.
Photo: Reuters
“This is a step backwards for European innovation, competition in AI development and further delays bringing the benefits of AI to people in Europe,” Meta wrote in a blog post. “Put simply, without including local information we’d only be able to offer people a second-rate experience. This means we aren’t able to launch Meta AI in Europe at the moment.”
A Meta spokesperson confirmed the company still plans to bring these products to Europe, but declined to share a timeline for when that would happen. At the end of last year, Facebook had 308 million daily active users in Europe, to the company’s financial statements showed.
Meta has been pouring significant resources into AI technology to keep pace with other tech giants, including Alphabet Inc’s Google, Microsoft Corp and OpenAI. The company debuted its latest large language model, Llama 3, in April, and already offers its Meta AI assistant to users of its apps in the US. Large language models are the technology that underpins types of generative AI, including chatbots.
On Thursday, Meta was hit with a Norwegian complaint over its plans to use the images and posts of users on Facebook and Instagram to train AI models.
The process to opt out breaches strict EU data protection rules and “has been made deliberately cumbersome by using deceptive design patterns and vague wording,” the Norwegian Consumer Council said in a statement.
“We are urging the Data Protection Authority to assess the legality of Meta’s practices and to ensure that the company is operating in compliance of the law,” Norwegian Consumer Council director-general Inger Lise Blyverket said in the statement.
The legal complaint was written by the European Center for Digital Rights and would be submitted to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority and other European data protection authorities.
The Irish Data Protection Commission is the lead authority for Meta, which has its EU base in Dublin.
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