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The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

sanders.senate.gov

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Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#131

Post by jmyeet »

rayiner wrote: post #67
jmyeet wrote: post #37

People on HN generally love municipal broadband. For good reasons. It is almost without exception better than any of the national ISPs. Cheaper too. Municipal broadband is just 100% publicly-owned. That's what that means. When you have a national ISP, you might not get a service at all despite the ISP guaranteeing service in exchange for money from the state they've taken. You get a service that starts at $60 but som…

You don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to believe you’re better off in the long run with strong property rights. To your example: I’ve got 10 gig fiber from a private company. My alternatives are 2 gig fiber from a private company, or 2 gig cable from a private company. I don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to wager that, if the people who ran Baltimore City Public Schools ran my broadband service, I wouldn’t have even 1 gig servic…

The "brutal communism of China" is just hilarious on its face. It's like a Freedom House type position [1]. Funded by the State Department btw. I'm sure it's unbiased.

Surveys of Chinese citizens show very high levels of satisfaction with their government [2] while Chinese people view the West through the "kill line" [3]. The funny part about that is the NYT blaming the kill line on "state media" [4] when it originated on Chinese social media. But that's how deep the anti-China propaganda goes in the US. The transformation Chinese people have seen in their daily lives in their lifetimes is something undeniable [5], liting ~800M people out of extreme poverty. What has the West done in that time? Does it seem like things are going well?

So all I did was point out how people like municipal broadband and you went straight to the slippery slope fallacy "but that's communism!" without actually knowing what communism actually is it seems.

The idea is pretty simple. The people should have a stake in the value they create. You know who else believes that? The US Department of Defense [6]. Is the Defense Department "Communist" too?

[1]: https://freedomhouse.org/country/china

[2]: https://ash.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/final_pol...

[3]: https://fpif.org/how-the-kill-line-redefined-the-american-dr...

[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/business/china-american-p...

[5]: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstrea...

[6]: https://investorplace.com/dailylive/2026/06/the-pentagon-is-...

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#132

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

nailer wrote: post #50
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #5

Why half of AI and not half of Walmart & Exxon & Apple? Government spending is already ~40% of GDP. And what do we get with this half? A sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims. What benefit does that have for anyone else? You can't build a sovereign wealth fund if you're transferring all the money out. That's just mor…

> sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims. Taking ownership of these companies is a Bernie thing not a Trump thing, but a sovereign wealth fund is used to pay off national debt.

You can't "pay off debt" with a "wealth fund".

You won't have any "wealth" if you use it.

That's just taxing and spending...

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#133

Post by Ancapistani »

triceratops wrote: post #101
mudil wrote: post #76

"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..."

That's one of my favorite verses, specifically because it leaves determining what is in fact Caesar's as an exercise for the reader.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#135

Post by pbasista »

In general, it seems to me that an abstract resource like AI cannot possibly be regulated. Even if US forced their hand and took ownership of the controlling stakes in the current major AI companies, what stops the other AI companies from raising up and doing whatever they want?

Perhaps the assumption is that these large AI companies need large datacenters to operate and that is how they will be regulated. But what about the datacenters outside the US jurisdiction? And what about local AI?

In the old days, the computers were huge and there was one per city. Now, several decades later, we all have plenty of our own computers. I cannot imagine why the trend would not continue with AI. Over time, it is in my opinion plausible that most of our common needs would be satisfied by local AI running on one's home servers or even phones.

How is that going to be regulated by owning a controlling stake in a few US AI companies?

I do not see into the details of what Mr. Bernie Sanders is suggesting. It seems to me though that his idea of somehow regulating the AI needs further development. Because the currently discussed approaches seem to me like a hot take that has not been thought over very well.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#136

Post by triceratops »

didibus wrote: post #134

The thing about owning is that it messes up the incentives. If the government owns something, it will be tempting to intervene if it loses value. And when he government needs money, they often sell at stupid prices. I think taxing makes more sense.

> If the government owns something, it will be tempting to intervene if it loses value.

Valid point. I'd propose that if the government owns anything it only gets non-voting shares. And it should never own a controlling share of anything.

> And when he government needs money, they often sell at stupid prices.

I'd apply some kind of indexing algorithm. Leaving it to individual managers is bound to lead to corruption.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#137

Post by triceratops »

solatic wrote: post #115

The public should own more than half. Via the stock market. Where public shareholders can vote in elections to control the Board of Directors, and elect Directors that act in the fiduciary interests of shareholders, and return excess capital to shareholders by issuing dividends. Where any member of the public can decide to buy or sell shares, being the most important development in the democratization of wealth devel…

The public doesn't have that much money.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#139

Post by triceratops »

axus wrote: post #7

Wouldn't taxes give more to the public than nationalization? I'd like the benefits of Communism without the downsides. There are efficiency benefits to the government owning stock vs. using the IRS for collection, that part I like. But I don't trust the US gov to use stock voting rights wisely.

> But I don't trust the US gov to use stock voting rights wisely.

What if it got ownership without voting rights?

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#140

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

TehCorwiz wrote: post #9
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #5

Why half of AI and not half of Walmart & Exxon & Apple? Government spending is already ~40% of GDP. And what do we get with this half? A sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims. What benefit does that have for anyone else? You can't build a sovereign wealth fund if you're transferring all the money out. That's just mor…

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.

So if they only use public domain data, and data from the Chinese and Europeans, do you still feel entitled to their valuations?

Because I hate to break it to you, they could have zero drop in quality by just not incorporating US data...

If we're talking about copyright, why are we somehow entitled to profits derived from stealing Taylor Swift's IP? Why do you get a cut of AI derivatives and not get half of her wealth, too, directly?

Microsoft has trained models entirely on synthetic and public data with SotA results.

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