AI Weekly Briefing — May 24, 2024
The EU AI Act cleared its final Council vote while OpenAI’s GPT-4o launch and U.S. Labor Department principles raised fresh governance checkpoints; Zeph Tech summarizes the adoption and compliance moves practitioners need this week.
Executive briefing: The week ending May 24, 2024 locked in the legislative finish line for the EU AI Act just as frontier model vendors and U.S. labor regulators introduced new risk-management expectations. Council adoption means prohibited practices must be decommissioned by February 2025, providers of general-purpose AI must stand up transparency systems ahead of the August 2025 window, and employers piloting automation must now align with the Department of Labor’s worker well-being safeguards. OpenAI’s GPT-4o release and Microsoft’s Build announcements simultaneously expanded multimodal capabilities that require refreshed procurement guardrails.
Week of May 20 highlights
- May 21 — EU Council final approval of the AI Act. Member states gave the last formal sign-off to Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, locking in the prohibition, general-purpose AI, and high-risk phase-in dates that start taking effect later this year.
- May 21 — Microsoft Build safety and deployment updates. Microsoft used Build 2024 to showcase Azure AI Studio’s safety evaluations, GPT-4o integration, and new real-time intelligence features that enterprises must vet before exposing production data.
- May 16 — U.S. Department of Labor AI principles. The agency published its Artificial Intelligence and Worker Well-Being: Principles for Developers and Employers, asking organizations to institute human-centric deployment reviews, traceability, and post-deployment monitoring.
- May 13 — OpenAI GPT-4o launch. OpenAI released GPT-4o with integrated text, vision, and speech capabilities, reshaping vendor evaluations for copilots, contact center tooling, and analytics assistants.
Governance actions
- Update EU AI Act roadmaps with the Council’s adoption milestone: prohibited systems off-boarding by February 2025, general-purpose AI transparency documentation by August 2025, and high-risk conformity assessments finalized by 2026.
- Incorporate Department of Labor worker-impact reviews into AI risk committees, mapping checkpoints to NIST AI RMF Govern and Measure functions and ISO/IEC 42001 clauses on socio-technical risk.
- Refresh vendor diligence questionnaires so GPT-4o pilots document model lineage, training data provenance, and incident response channels before they enter employee- or customer-facing flows.
Adoption and enablement tasks
- Stand up Azure AI Studio evaluation sandboxes that exercise Microsoft’s new guardrails with organization-specific datasets before committing to Build-previewed capabilities.
- Re-baseline enterprise model inventories with modality tags—text, vision, audio—to capture GPT-4o and other multimodal services now in procurement pipelines.
- Align human capital, privacy, and security stakeholders on the Department of Labor principles so worker representatives participate in pre-launch risk sign-off and continuous improvement loops.