"Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice." - Thomas Sowell
"Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's..."
The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
101–110 of 290 posts
Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because AI companies basically took everything we ever wrote, drew, recorded, posted, or thought and turned it into a product with the power to lie, propagandize, and manipulate the public with zero oversight. Walmart is a parasite using welfare to subsidize their operations but they didn't tell a judge that they were immune to copyright because they stole just so much damn information.
Yes but all the AI companies took all the public data, so when you pay for an AI model you are paying for the marginal service of building a model off that data, not for the data itself. What we should do is ensure that the data is available to more people to train AI models... but sadly this doesn't seem to be happening. Instead AI companies that were first-movers got to train off public data, and as the companies a…
I don't really buy this argument. When you buy a physical product, you are paying the entire product lifecycle, not just the marginal aspect of retail distribution. This is the same thing. The marginal inference has to come FROM somewhere. It doesn't just appear out of nowhere.
Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
#103Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Took. As in: without permission. Didn't ask before hand, didn't provide a way to opt-out (although that would also be problematic), didn't ask for volunteers. Took.
The word you're looking for is "copied". Don't fall for the great lie of intellectual "property".
If I can go to jail over it then they should too. Let's not judge them by some imaginary ideal world while judging individuals by the present crushing reality.
Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
#105> A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations I know many here would scoff at nationalizing a private company, but AI is a usurpation of human knowledge and quite literally at times. (Every AI company was embroiled in copyright lawsuits and lord knows what Qwen et al are up to.) In…
You can tax something without owning it. It is the owning part that bothers me. It implies that the government is going to shovel ridiculous amounts of money into these things and when the bubble finally pops We The People get nothing out of it.
I think you've misunderstood the proposal. The government levies a tax in the form of shares, not cash. It doesn't pay for the shares.
FTA: "It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock."
Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
#106Lately I've been thinking about digital co-ops. Imagine a member owned server farm for running private AI models and cloud services. It could be small, like a neighborhood or citywide project running on cobbled together used hardware like that post the other day where someone got an older server GPU running on his PC. Or it could be a small data center for small businesses and individual users to use. Members could have more privacy than giving all their data to companies like Google and they could have a say in what hardware is used and what type of energy generation is used to power it. There seem to have been more posts over the last couple years about running home media servers and getting away from subscription services; maybe something like that could be an alternative to what we have now.
Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
#107Between California and the federal government the public is already going to receive half the value of the equity in cash. The only question is will they buy back in ?
Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
#108Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Labor displacement is always coming. Every new technology eliminates some old occupations and creates new ones. LLMs aren't unique in that regard. We should have a safety net to support and retrain displaced workers regardless of the technology. And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.
What are the jobs AI is creating, specifically? > And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans. I don't think AI actually capable of doing so, but AI companies need to stop bragging about wanting to do this and making it their goal if you don't want people to keep bringing it up.
There are lots of new jobs in building data centers, plus all the components that go into those. For example, worldwide employee count at Amphenol is way up over the past couple years. They make a lot of electrical connectors and similar items.
Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
#110> A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations I know many here would scoff at nationalizing a private company, but AI is a usurpation of human knowledge and quite literally at times. (Every AI company was embroiled in copyright lawsuits and lord knows what Qwen et al are up to.) In…
> In turn, everyone knows labor displacement is coming What % of Americans would agree to that. 10%? I agree for those of us in the field, we are a lot more confident. But I dont think my retired parents have any idea what AI is or have ever touched anything more complicated than Alexia.
That's, in large part, because tech is the field most likely to face labor disruption. Most jobs in the US are service, labor, and other such fields where LLMs will have relatively little impact.
Tech will also probably come under attack from two directions. It's not only from labor replacement, but also from a decrease in the value of tech. Right now competition in tech is limited by the relatively large barrier to entry to writing even simple programs. As that barrier disappears, the baseline value of tech will likely decline sharply.