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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

#171

Post by jcranmer »

vrganj wrote: post #81
Aunche wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The oil is on Alaska/Norway's land, so they can choose what they want to do with money from selling that oil including distributing it or purchasing assets. Sanders seem to be proposing to arbitrarily seize half of the companies.

> The oil is on Alaska/Norway's land These AI companies are on American land.

In the case of Alaska, the oil is literally on land owned by the State of Alaska (as in, the titleholder of the land is the state itself), and the rights to oil extraction is leased by the state to oil companies.

By contrast, data centers are generally going to be on land owned by the operator, and corporate offices are either owned by the company or leased to the company by some commercial real estate operator you've probably never heard of. In neither sense are they on land owned by any local, state, or federal government.

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

#172

Post by opsnooperfax »

pokstad wrote: post #149

If the public wants to own half of the AI company, then they should invest enough to buy half of it. Taking private property away without compensation is stealing. What the government did with Intel where they got 10% in stock was a bit better because Intel got money.

You basically described taxation. 25-75% of all your income is confiscated at the source and then you get… whatever it is that Washington does. I guess remit the money back as programs and direct payments or services so thousands of people can wet their beak in the process?

In practice, we’re OK with theft. We just argue over who gets the loot and which segment of the population gets harmed.

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

#173

Post by jmyeet »

fny wrote: post #22

> 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…

The impacts of AI amplify the system we live in. We live in a society that is quite happy to let people starve on the street and die to protect home values. We're bouldering towards minting trillionaires at the same time as people are struggling to afford rent and having enough food to eat where they're one bad event from being homeless.

I agree that labor displacement (and wage suppression) is in fact the only AI product. IN a just society, automation (more generally than AI) would allow people to work less. But we all know that it just means further wealth concentration and inequality.

And as material conditions worsen, society will increasingly rip itself apart. Populism will lead people to blame various out-groups for their woes because there'll be no opposition to it. It's why in the year of our Lord 2026, we have concentration camps again. Some call that term hyperbolic given the association with the HOlocaust. These people don't know history. Concentration camps were originally deportation camps [1].

I keep bringing up municipal broadband as an example of how people who hate "communism" both like their output and it's always better than national ISPs. And you know who else believes in public ownership? The US Department of Defense [2].

[1]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deportatio...

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

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

#174

Post by mrguyorama »

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…

>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 service.

Pay up. Municipal broadband is objectively better than the other options pretty much everywhere it hasn't been banned.

Municipal broadbands were laying 1 gig fiber service while Spectrum and Comcast were still selling 10mb/s as standard.

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

#175

Post by Blackstrat »

Under no conditions should the government own AI companies. The government has its hands in too many companies already. What needs to happen is stricter enforcement of copyright laws and intellectual property rights. In other words, AI training data should be curtailed substantially until such time as the companies are willing to pay for it. It's no different than the various other internet piracy issues, e.g., movies and music. Just more hype at the moment. That too will pass.

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

#176

Post by snake42 »

shadowtree wrote: post #64
trismus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were long ancestral lines of humans who were very very keen on not redistributing power for many generations. They were called kings. Cutting their heads off was the best thing to happen to society, ever. Take the long view. Our particular economic and ideological moment is not worth defending.

This is ahistoric drivel. China and Russia are simple examples of the fallout of "cutting king's heads". So awesome in China that they went straight back to a lifetime emperor now. The French Revolution and its fallout (communism, fascism) killed more humans than any other historic movement, triggering 2 world wars, including numerous genocides.

Blaming an event that happened in 1789 for the first and second world wars seems incredibly far fetched. Maybe we should blame the aggressors who started the wars.

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

#177

Post by jst1fthsdys »

csallen wrote: post #156
jst1fthsdys wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Produced the corpus of knowledge they trained on.

The fact that somebody benefited from the output of your work is not the same thing as extracting your labor. Extracting your labor means that before you even create the work, they're conscripting you to do it. For example, I created a useful organization at my school before I graduated. That was twenty years ago. It still exists, and people are still benefiting from it. But they don't somehow owe me compensation, no…

This chain has been using expropriate, not extract. Not sure why you mentioned that.

Your story doesn't really relate. I get what you are saying, but your org wasn't copyrighted under you, nor did you expect any monetary returns on it. They stole copyrighted work without permission.

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

#178

Post by rayiner »

mrguyorama wrote: post #174
rayiner wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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 service. Pay up. Municipal broadband is objectively better than the other options pretty much everywhere it hasn't been banned. Municipal broadbands were laying 1 gig fiber service while Spectrum and Comcast were still selling 10mb/s as standard.

Municipal broadband has never been banned in Maryland, where I live. Or in New York, Delaware, or Georgia, where I’ve also lived. Where are the great municipal broadband networks in these state?

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

#179

Post by rickydroll »

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…

> Why half of AI and not half of Walmart & Exxon & Apple?

I think the 50% number is a stake in the ground, period. A starting point for the discussion.

Why not Walmart? That's a great idea. Many companies, including Walmart, pay their employees so little that they qualify for Medicaid and other social benefits even though they're working full-time.

One of the primary methods of building wealth in this country is through stock ownership. Instead of being a wage slave, only making money based on your labor, with a stock tax on a company, the growth of that company's stock benefits everyone in the country directly, rather than just the moneyed few.

> 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.

That is a risk with an administration like the current one, but if the sovereign fund was ethically managed by an independent department, that wouldn't be an issue. The rest of the world has sovereign wealth funds, and you can find some good examples of how to do it right.

> What benefit does that have for anyone else?

How do you benefit with a 401k owning stock? What works for one should work for the other.

> You can't build a sovereign wealth fund if you're transferring all the money out. That's just more government spending, not a wealth fund.

How does any sovereign wealth fund increase its value? Proper planning, spending only dividends and not principal. Also, the sovereign wealth fund would continue to acquire stock whenever any company issues new stock. The fund would get 50% of those shares.

If one were to make it an active fund, the government has enough insider knowledge to know when to buy, sell, and short stocks. What? Using insider knowledge is unfair, you say? Why shouldn't the government play by the same rules as the rest of the finance industry? It's only us retail investors that have less-than-optimal returns because of insufficient knowledge.

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