The EU’s privacy watchdog is investigating how Google is using personal data in the development of one of its artificial intelligence models.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC)—the bloc’s regulatory body for companies headquartered in Ireland—announced on Sept. 12. that it was investigating compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules by Google’s Pathways Language Model 2, also known as PaLM2.
The regulator said it is working with partners in the European Economic Area to regulate the processing of personal data belonging to EU users being used in the development of AI models and systems.
Its inquiry will examine whether Google has assessed if PaLM2’s data processing is likely to result in a “high risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals” in the EU, the commission said.
According to Google, PaLM2 is a “next-generation language model with improved multilingual, reasoning and coding capabilities” that builds on the company’s previous research in machine learning and AI.
The model, which was pre-trained on a “large quantity of webpage, source code, and other datasets,” according to Google, can translate between languages, conduct math tasks, answer questions, and write computer code, among other things.