Meta's FAIR has several R&D offices in the EU, yes. So you are saying their labs can conduct R&D on models in the EU, potentially even train them there, they just can't have production LLM inference serving or release the model weights? I'm just not seeing it.
A not-insignificant portion of the AI/ML research community is in the EU.
What you’re failing to understand is that meta is ultimately a US company. If meta unveils a powerful frontier model tomorrow and US impose a ban of its exports, regardless of how many research, data centres, meta has in EU, they will restrict access to the model for EU citizens, same way Anthropic did.
Regarding the open weights, I don’t see meta doing that for their future models, especially once they have their own frontier models. Open weight models are kinda marketing strategy where they use it as a bait and switch. A lot of Chinese companies became popular with their open wight models and once they build that reputation they have no incentive to keep on releasing new open weighted models
In an imaginary world yes. Just because they know how, doesn’t mean that they can. It’s not like you can code a new model, you need compute power to train it, which they don’t have in EU.
Also meta could just take the best mind in EU research centres to US with millions of dollars as yearly payments
A not-insignificant portion of the AI/ML research community is in the EU.