Meta Platforms (META.US), the parent company of Facebook, has announced that it will not offer its multimodal AI model Llama to customers in the European Union due to the unpredictable regulatory environment in Europe.

Meta stated that it will delay the launch of its AI assistant Meta AI in Europe as it is addressing requests from the Irish privacy regulator regarding the use of Facebook and Instagram content as training data. The company has also seen the advocacy group NOYB file complaints in 11 European countries, accusing it of planning to use personal data to train its AI models without obtaining user consent.

Similarly, Apple (AAPL.US) indicated last month that it has postponed the release of several AI features in the EU due to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is legislation that establishes objective standards to classify large online platforms as "gatekeepers" and ensures they operate fairly online while leaving room for contention.

Meta intends to integrate the new multimodal model into various products, including smartphones and the company's Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, which will be capable of reasoning across video, audio, images, and text.

Meta pointed out that European businesses and institutions are likely to fail because they cannot access the latest and best open models. The company added that European regulators take longer than those in other parts of the world to determine legal requirements.

Meta also mentioned that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the UK is nearly identical, but the company continues to operate in the UK because UK authorities provide clear feedback on identified issues. Therefore, according to insiders, the issue is not legal but rather concerns the unpredictable application of laws in the EU.

Meta also plans to soon launch a larger pure text version of the Llama 3 model, which will be available to EU customers and companies. Training AI models requires vast amounts of data, and companies in the EU must comply with regulations on how to collect and process user personal data.

In May, Meta announced its intention to use publicly available posts from Facebook and Instagram users to train future models. The company stated that it had informed EU regulators of its AI plans months before the announcement and had addressed their feedback, although there was little feedback received.

In June, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) requested that Meta postpone using publicly available content from Facebook and Instagram to train its large language model (LLM) on behalf of European data protection authorities. Meta added that after the launch, EU regulators requested a suspension without explicitly expressing concerns and posed over 270 detailed questions. The company noted that it will continue to engage with the Irish DPC, but the reality of the European regulatory environment is that it is unclear when training can begin.

However, the company emphasized that training on EU data is crucial to ensure its products accurately reflect the region's terminology and culture. Meta stated that its models would not perform as well for European citizens and businesses and would be more Americanized rather than globalized.

Meta previously mentioned that it is following the lead of other companies, such as Alphabet's Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI, both of which have used data from Europeans to train their AI.