Appreciate your response Jordan! Very interesting to get this behind the scenes look and helpful to get your take on the legal context of the OSAID’s functioning.
Regarding this:
Essentially, the OSAID’s approach is: release the data, if not tell us where it can be obtained, and give us the code to sort, organise and prepare it, if you can’t do that, give us an adequately detailed description so that we can reproduce the dataset ourselves.
I note that your paraphrase here is already a bit more detailed than what the OSAID and the faq actually specify. I think the categories of “obtainable (including for a fee)” and “private” provide a lot of wiggle room for bad-faith compliance.
As a community member pointed out here, water seeks its own level. Model providers will generally seek ways of complying that minimise hassle and legal exposure. I am not sure the “adequately detailed description” will sufficient or well-specified enough for meaningful levels of openness, especially not since it seems to mirror the underspecified notion of “sufficiently detailed” in the AI Act.
As we wrote last year in a paper devoted to what I now know is your contribution to the EU AI Act (respect!): “Figuring out what constitutes a “sufficiently detailed summary” will literally become a million dollar question.”
Anyway, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We will have to see whether and how model providers will seek compliance with OSAID and we will be watching this space with a lot of curiosity.
Thanks again for the insights into the process, much appreciated.