Opinion When two stories from opposite ends of the IT universe boil down to the same thing, the bulls sounded. On the over-the-top AI side of the tech, Meta has begrudgingly followed a decision not to feed European social media crap into its training data. Meanwhile, in the industrial slums, 20 percent of running Microsoft SQL Server instances are now past the end of support.

In a saner world, the second story would have the same prominence in the mainstream media as everything else in AI and cybercrime that fills the headlines. Databases make the world go round. They're where the AI training data lives, they're where the ransomware attackers go to loot. They hold our money, our health, our digital lives. They are the core of every business, big or small. They're also relentlessly boring, at least by standards, so when one in five cases of a regular database is out of date in a hostile environment, no one cares. What's worse, one in five sysadmins here doesn't either. If these databases were milk in the fridge, you would know about them. But databases don't smell when they reach their expiration date.

Back at Meta, the ban on European training data due to privacy has validity, but masks many unresolved issues. How does an LLM cope with 20-plus different languages? We don't even really know how one is doing. It's definitely a fascinating area of research, and not one you want hundreds of millions of citizens to get live tomorrow. A bigger question, however, is what will happen when products based on European free education data are released on the European market.

If efforts to regulate and ethicize AI get anywhere, they will minimize the use of biased training data that could harm users down the road. If AI were a dairy farm, banning European training data would be like banning harmful feed additives, and ethical AI guidelines would prevent the sale of milk from poorly fed cows.