Sundar Pichai and Bard's absence from the EU: "We'll be there soon, but we want to respect all the rules"

Bard, one of Google's generative AIs, will be accessible in 180 countries of the world but in no country of the European Union: the news emerged between the lines of the many presentations and I/O 2023 conference announcements and did not fail to arouse perplexities, even on American sites.

Why did Google decide to do such a thing? Why cut off a large and important market like that of the EU? There are various hypotheses and there is an official response from the company, and therefore let's start from there to try to understand how things are.

Why Bard is missing from the EU: the hypotheses

The possible reasons of this absence are mainly three:

• it is possible that it happened for what happened in Italy with OpenAI and ChatGPT, blocked for a month by the Privacy Guarantor and returned online only after having corrected the rules on the processing of user data;

• Google may fear i stakes imposed by the Gdpr European Union (and not being sure of respecting all the rules) and above all fearing the next AI Act, which should come into force in 2024;

• EU countries group about 450 million peoplemore than US residents, who may be too large a customer base for Bard to satisfy, at least for now.

Why Bard is missing from the EU: the official answer

We wrote “at least for the moment” because Google actually looks like it intending to arrive in Europe with Bard, sooner or later. The company somehow confirmed this on stage at I/O 2023, saying that with Bard "we will soon be able to support the 40 most common languages ​​in the world" (yes, Italian is among them) and giving this answer official to the doubts raised about the current absence from EU countries: “We have not finalized the timetable for this enlargement” but “we will proceed gradually and responsibly and continue to work with the authorities as we get to know these new technologies together”.

Interview

Sundar Pichai: With Google on the side of peace and prosperity

by Bruno Ruffilli

May 27, 2022

Pichai: "The race for AI is not a race to see who finishes first"

This is more or less the answer he gave us Sundar Pichai, current CEO of Google and Alphabet, when we had the opportunity to meet him right during I/O 2023. And with some interesting additions though.

We pointed out to him the absence of any EU country from the 180 in which Bard is available, underlining that it can hardly be a problem of language barriers and that it is unlikely to be a coincidence: “It is obviously a choice, but why was this choice made? - we asked him bluntly - Aren't you afraid of European rules and that something similar to what happened to OpenAI will happen to you?”.

Before answering us, and already while listening to the question, he smiled at us: he obviously expected a similar request. And then he told us that “the issue is twofold: we want to translate Bard into various languages ​​and we want to do it well, which is more difficult than it seems, above all to grasp the right nuances in words and expressions, to avoid that the answers give wrong or misleading information”. It is partly for this reason that after English "we moved on to Japanese and Korean, because they are complex and difficult languages: if we made it with them, we can make it anywhere".

And then “there actually is the problem of rules, which are more complicated in some countries than in others”. Despite this, "Bard will arrive in the EU, because it is among the most important areas in the world and because we absolutely want to be there - added Pichai - But we want to be there respecting all the rules with our products, we will respect them and we are developing them precisely because they respect them”.

In general, according to Google's number one, “artificial intelligence is a technology that it touches humanity from so many points of view”, therefore “it is important to do it well and respecting the rules” and “we will be able to do it well and we will do it correctly”. The point, we understand, is that "we don't see this as a race: whoever comes first doesn't win, whoever does the right thing wins”. Which is also a great answer to the many who say that Big G is lagging behind in this field.

@capoema