Let's, I'll just dive straight into just a quick introduction. I work for the OSIS as well.
I'm Jordan Maris, I'm their EU policy analyst, so I spend actually all of my time here in Brussels.
Working on EU-related issues, so a lot of my time is spent trying to educate lawmakers,
and trying to work as well with lawmakers when we're developing laws, so that open sources in mind.
I'm a former EU parliamentary staffer, and I've been a user-breaking source, and so I was a child,
and somebody gave me a Linux live CD, took about six hours to get the Wi-Fi working, but I did get there and stuck with it afterwards.
So basically, in order to explain to you why we've done the things we've done, I'm in a terrible little story.
A long time ago, before Chacchipiti was a thing in a parliament, approximately 20 minutes from here,
there was a young policy advisor, and he was sat in the negotiations on the AI Act,
along with a couple of other people who just outside this room, and as the negotiations were coming to a close,
he made the terrible mistake of asking, what about open source?
And this ended up creating a lot of problems for basically everyone.
You see, we exempted open source from the AI Act, and we didn't direct precisely enough.
The result was a handful of companies, in particular one or two, decided that they could exploit that exemption,
to get away with not complying with the law.
Now, around this time, the OSI also started work on its open source AI definition, which was really great.
And just after I joined the OSI, we were having a discussion in Brussels with a former colleague who was working on the law,
and I introduced Simon as a director of the open source initiative, explained what we do,
and their question was, okay, well, we passed this law, we said AI is exempt, but what does it actually mean?
And that's the problem that I've been faced with over the past five months.
And the problem is basically simple, there are two visions of open source AI and Brussels.
The vision that Metahalf, which is not particularly writing my opinion, and then there's the OSI-D.
So, Metahalf's vision is based on probably free key arguments.
The first argument is that AI is different to software, it's so different, in fact,
that everything that we consider to make sense doesn't make sense anymore.
So, the argument is essentially, we get to redefine what open source AI means, because it's so different.
The second argument, which they use, is that AI poses a threat, a fundamental threat,
and giving it to everybody without restrictions or control is a risk.
The third argument is that their AI is the most used, and it's true, Lama has been deployed many times, but that doesn't make it free.
Unfortunately, they've been very, very successful in Brussels.
So, what we have essentially is an army of corporate lobbyists who want to redefine what open source means, and they are winning.
They're winning as well, because we are an enormous community, and we are not very well represented in Brussels.
We are more and more represented in Brussels.
So, we've gone from having a handful of people doing open source here to about seven, which is great news for us.
We have to fight back, and the OSID is the way to fight back.
The reasons for that are that what lawmakers require from us, what they want to hear from us,
is a definition that they can use in all situations from a legal perspective.
It means that they have to be able to apply it, and it means that it has to address the challenges that come with releasing the data.
I can give you two, and perhaps a couple more, data protection isn't obvious.
Metas Lama was never going to be open source in the European Union, because it's probably trained on users' data, and that creates a problem.
But the question is, how do we deal with that in other cases such as medical AI?
If we want to build, for example, an open source AI to analyze CT scans, how can we do that in a way
that respects the privacy of the people who donate their CT scans to the data set,
but also gives us the possibility to do what open source allows us to do.
The second thing is the copyright rules.
It's kind of difficult, but when you look at, for example, the Bible.
It's not exactly the text that we might use primarily to train an AI.
But in different jurisdictions, the Bible has different copyright.
The CT James Bible, in most of the European Union, is basically public.
You can use it, however, like in the United Kingdom, it's crown copyright.
For image generation, you could take a lot of Italian artwork, for example, which, in most of the European Union, has no restrictions,
but in Italy, is state copyright.
This is quite a big problem, because the data sets that we're using to build AI are enormous.
And it just takes one thing like this, one of these edge cases, which we don't know how to manage to create enormous problems.
The reason that the ISAID is a good choice to fight back against open-washing, is because it can adapt to these use cases.
In my view, yeah, also important note, sorry.
It was written with lawmakers in mind, but not four lawmakers.
So the ISAID process was not written for the people who are making the law.
It just happens to be a very good solution.
So how do we actually comply with the open-source definition?
How do we build the ISAID in a way that we're working all these cases, but doesn't compromise the four freedoms?
Well, first of all, we mandate the training data, the sharing of all training data, which can be legally and technically shared.
Another example of a case where the data might not be shareable is where it's directly, essentially directly fed into the model,
and the quantities of data are too large to store.
So take maybe certain or something like that as an example, you know, radio telescopes, that sort of thing.
It mandates sharing where that data cannot be acquired.
So let's say, for example, we have a image generation AI, which has been trained on films.
It mandates that you say exactly which films it was trained on and where they can be acquired for the purposes of AI training.
Third thing, it mandates quite highly detailed granular descriptions of the data for the purposes of replicating something similar.
So essentially, what the OSID says is, where it is not legally or technically possible to share the data, you have to give people the instructions to build something that is equivalent.
And I think that's how we can respect the four freedoms whilst still having a tool that we can use the icon use here in Brussels to fight open-washing,
which is what we've been doing for the last five months.
So here's what we're doing now. We are going to lawmakers, going to staff is in the European Parliament in the commission,
talking to them about this. There's also a letter that's being prepared by MEPs with our support to be sent to the European Commission.
We are participating in the European Commission's working group on codes of practice for open-source AI,
where we're fighting back against acceptable use policies and other such restrictions which are incompatible with open-source.
We are highlighting the open-washing matter of doing, even when they have an army of corporate lobbyists trying to convince everybody the country,
and we are going around presenting the OSID, both to technical and to political audiences across the Union.
So thank you very much, really nice to hear from you.