Even so, why would the licensor put it in and force it through a license. It's on the licensee to check the laws and regulations they themselves operate in.

The EU AI Act is supposed to affect all AI "providers", which includes any "natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body that develops an AI system or a general-purpose AI model or that has an AI system or a general-purpose AI model developed and places it on the market or puts the AI system into service under its own name or trademark, whether for payment or free of charge" [0].

This would plausibly include anyone developing an LLM, even if they aren't selling access to it or building applications based on it. There are several exemptions, and the Act obstensibly avoids creating burdens for most general-purpose LLMs, but the point is that Huawei wants to avoid any worry by not "plac[ing] it on the market" in the first place.

[0] https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/3/

Hence, the lack of European innovation in AI

I don’t agree. Tools like DeepL were and still are better than Google Translate long before chat bots became a thing. The French-made Mistral AI is pretty decent as well.

Saw some benchmarks recently that put Mistral well behind basically every other competitor. Don't have them on hand unfortunately.

FWIW, I refactored 500+ Junit 4 to Junit 5 tests with locally running Mistral 8B on an M3 MBP. It worked flawlessly, but surely I cannot attest for other use cases.

Edit: it was 8B, not 7B.

They are not the best sure, but are very inexpensive, offer better privacy and are super fast.

What specifically is it about the law slowing innovation?

Is it something these companies do that they worry violates it?