US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters • Hacker News Board

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#221

Post by vibrio » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:13 PM UTC

drooby wrote: post #216

pixl97 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no us, there is only you, by default. To move beyond that default you need to organize into things like communities, lobbying groups, and/or even governments. Ownership of singular non-physical objects is a polite lie we tell ourselves because it makes us feel more secure in a universe filled with information chaos. The moment you open your mouth or move your pen you no longer own what is in your mind, it is…

No offense, but this comment makes virtually zero contact with reality. Our entire civilization runs on your "polite lie" of owning non-physical things. Patents, copyrights, trade secrets, licensing agreements, NDAs. Trillion dollar companies are built on the legal enforceability of intellectual property. The software you're using to type this comment exists because someone owns the code. Calling information "entropy…

(not intending ot be snarky, but this isn't my area of knowledge in the least.) Didn't the AI organizations 'get it both ways' when they trained on vast collection of works under copyright and then purely "own' the outcome?

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#222

Post by drooby » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

vibrio wrote: post #221

drooby wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but this comment makes virtually zero contact with reality. Our entire civilization runs on your "polite lie" of owning non-physical things. Patents, copyrights, trade secrets, licensing agreements, NDAs. Trillion dollar companies are built on the legal enforceability of intellectual property. The software you're using to type this comment exists because someone owns the code. Calling information "entropy…

(not intending ot be snarky, but this isn't my area of knowledge in the least.) Didn't the AI organizations 'get it both ways' when they trained on vast collection of works under copyright and then purely "own' the outcome?

That's not snarky at all, that's exactly the point. They did get it both ways.

The comment I was responding to argued that ownership of non-physical things is basically a "polite lie" and that information is just entropy that belongs to whoever can capture it. My point was that the AI companies clearly don't believe that when it applies to them. They patent their architectures, copyright their outputs, sue competitors for IP violations, and lock down their model weights. They fully believe in ownership of non-physical things.

But when it comes to the billions of people whose work they trained on? Suddenly information is free-flowing entropy that belongs to no one.

That's the asymmetry at the heart of this. The rules around IP apparently apply when it protects their profits, but not when it would obligate them to share those profits with the people whose work made them possible. Which is exactly why the public needs to assert a claim now, before that asymmetry gets any more entrenched.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#223

Post by WarmWash » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #218

WarmWash wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's slop, why do they pay for it? I mean, raise you hand if you have never paid for AI "slop", I see maybe a hand or two in this room of tens of thousands. It's a strawman to frame it as AI labs get everything and society gets nothing. Bruh, the fastest growing applications of all time didn't explode in popularity because they "offer nothing of value". I'm not giving you an argument, I'm giving you a reality chec…

Congratulations, you ignored all the substance in my post and focused on one word.

The gain isn't private though, that's the point. If people weren't gaining from LLMs, why would they be paying for it?

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#224

Post by drooby » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

drooby wrote: post #222

vibrio wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(not intending ot be snarky, but this isn't my area of knowledge in the least.) Didn't the AI organizations 'get it both ways' when they trained on vast collection of works under copyright and then purely "own' the outcome?

That's not snarky at all, that's exactly the point. They did get it both ways. The comment I was responding to argued that ownership of non-physical things is basically a "polite lie" and that information is just entropy that belongs to whoever can capture it. My point was that the AI companies clearly don't believe that when it applies to them. They patent their architectures, copyright their outputs, sue competitor…

Addition:

Also worth knowing: collective intellectual property already exists. ASCAP and BMI have been doing exactly this for decades. Individual songwriters can't enforce their rights every time their music gets played, so they pool their IP, license it collectively, and distribute the revenue. The problem they solved is almost identical to the training data problem. Each individual contribution is tiny, but the collective value is enormous. Applying this at the scale of the general public would be novel, but the underlying mechanism isn't. The concept works. It just hasn't been applied to training data yet.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#225

Post by overfeed » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

Mark Zuckerberg, also at the White House in 2025, as caught by a hot mic: "Sorry, I wasn't ready... I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with."

The pledge is meaningless political theater meant to placate voters in the mid-terms.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#226

Post by Arainach » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #223

Arainach wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations, you ignored all the substance in my post and focused on one word.

The gain isn't private though, that's the point. If people weren't gaining from LLMs, why would they be paying for it?

The users aren't the ones getting trillion dollar valuations. And for most of them the answer is "they don't have a choice, it's bundled into Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace / Meta / everything" or "they're not, their employer is paying for it".

The answer to "why do businesses pay for stupid things of questionable hard-to-prove value based on hype cycles" would take many books.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#227

Post by terminalshort » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:23 PM UTC

drooby wrote: post #172

terminalshort wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can only use each barrel of oil once, so it is not remotely the same thing. It's like torrenting a movie vs stealing someone's car. My labor has been compensated and nothing has been extracted.

Fair point, data isn't scarce like oil. Nobody's losing their forum posts. That part of my analogy is weak. But you're answering a question I'm not asking. The question isn't "was something taken from you." It's "who deserves a share when collective human output generates trillions in commercial value." your torrenting analogy makes my case. Nobody loses their original movie when it gets pirated either. We still reco…

Typically you don't get compensated for secondary or higher order value generated by your work. Every software startup today is only possible because of the massive amount of collective effort to build the computing hardware that it runs on and the work to construct the actual physical network of the internet. But that doesn't mean that you have to pay all those people for that work just because your company ends up making billions. Or you could say that actually the company does pay those people indirectly through all the economic activity and tax revenue generated. AI is the same. No special rules are needed.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#228

Post by shimman » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:47 PM UTC

GrinningFool wrote: post #203

shimman wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not democracy if you can't destroy it. It's not democracy if the citizens cannot reject it. It's not democracy if it's being forced down your throat. Sick of how SV/VC absolutely ruin words for their own monetary benefit. How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone ra…

> How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone rather than benefiting the few. You're probably right -- except for the billions in massive PR campaigns that will be spent to successfully convince enough of them that it's in their best interest to let the companies keep owne…

Their billions in PR isn't stopping people from rejecting data centers being built in their communities.

What you have to understand about advocacy is that it's the worst form of politics and it only goes so far. Paid canvassers aren't convincing compared to actual humans organizing with one another.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#229

Post by pixl97 » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 8:05 PM UTC

drooby wrote: post #222

vibrio wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(not intending ot be snarky, but this isn't my area of knowledge in the least.) Didn't the AI organizations 'get it both ways' when they trained on vast collection of works under copyright and then purely "own' the outcome?

That's not snarky at all, that's exactly the point. They did get it both ways. The comment I was responding to argued that ownership of non-physical things is basically a "polite lie" and that information is just entropy that belongs to whoever can capture it. My point was that the AI companies clearly don't believe that when it applies to them. They patent their architectures, copyright their outputs, sue competitor…

I mean, the AI companies want it this way, but the same laws of information apply to them too. They can patent whatever they want, but as we see other nations use their models to distill information to other models with almost nothing they can do about it.

Patents, copyright, lawsuits are all post ad hoc actions which mean the milk has already been stolen. And it only works if the rule of law is something that is respected, that's not going so well lately.

We are seeing this in that there is little to no moat between the models, nearly everyone with the needed compute seems to catch up pretty quickly. And when said rivalries cross national boarders the only solution to these problems quickly becomes violence.

With how information works AI wins this game in the long run. Individual humans scale poorly and their ability to individually acquire information is a slow process. Looking at this on a company by company basis is not the proper way to show how the future with models is going to play out.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#230

Post by gwerbin » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

drooby wrote: post #155

drooby wrote: post #149

The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing. Alaska and Norway understood something critical…

if you assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space. But the model is built on us. You can move the server anywhere you want. You can’t escape the fact that everything inside it came from human minds. That’s an ownership claim no one can relocate away from.

> if you assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space.

This is the same false threat that gets repeated over and over whenever anyone tries to regulate or tax anything.