Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Private Capture of Public Genius

wysr.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 111 posts

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#41

Post by stale2002 »

I'm surprised that the Author has missed a very important corollary to the diffusion of "genius theft" that they are bringing up.

And that is the diffusion of the beneficiaries. Maybe they think that OpenAI and Anthropic are actually worth, like a trillion dollars each and can therefore have value extracted from them. I'm not so convinced.

What if there aren't frontier labs spending billions on training a model. What if, instead, open source is at least mostly competitive with the top models. And if the models are open source (or weights, whatever you want to call it) the people benefiting are actually just rando people or startup founders.

What are you going to do if you want to extract this value from this diffuse set of beneficiaries? Put an arbitrary tax on anyone living on San Francisco or something??

The reality is that the author is trying to put the genie back into the bottle. All technological progress has winners and losers. It has people who are even benefiting from the rest of society and making personal gain based on that.

But, at the end of the day, doing accounting math on how much an individual benefited from a specific common good as vague as societal knowledge is impractical. And yet technological progress benefits all of society in a wholistic sense.

Additionally, the author focuses so much on the extraction of a public good, I am surprised that they failed to address that these labs are creating a public good as well. Who's to say that this "theft" is larger than the production of public goods that these labs give to the public in the first place.

I mean, my life has been massively improved by the fact that I have access to these models. And I'm not convinced that I have produce enough myself to outweigh this benefit that they are giving to me, so I consider it to be a fair trade.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#42

Post by supriyo-biswas »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #2

This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " I'm in Australia. I've contributed my share of dirt to the delta. Why do I not get a share of this? I get that the frontier companies are (for the moment) US companies. But that's just corporate ownership, it's not what we're talking about. We're talking about compensating the people who wrote the training data for…

> This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. "

There could be so many other ways to set this up. Enforce a higher tax on any business selling AI models that have capabilities greater than some threshold, and use it to fund development and infrastructure project like roads, hospitals, schools, etc. Or you could even do a negative income tax[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#43

Post by marcus_holmes »

archagon wrote: post #39
marcus_holmes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a great idea, I hope you get traction with it :) I am personally coming to the conclusion that having these vast repositories of knowledge that can actually talk to us is actually great. We have some issues to solve, but the end-state of having a global repository of all knowledge that can talk to us and answer questions is actually an amazing outcome. We just need to solve those problems first; mostly getting p…

Imagine that AI lives up to its promise, gets captured by a handful of corporations, and ushers in a world of untouchable über-oligarchs that de facto rule the world. Would it have been worth it then? Can this problem even be solved?

I mean, yes, that's one possible outcome.

I personally believe that it's more likely that the current batch of massively overleveraged AI companies go broke in the next year or so as the AI bubble bursts. Hopefully the USA manages to get its democratic shit together enough to not bail them out (as happened in 2008), and they just... stop.

The OSS models are almost at the same level, and are progressing fine. The technology continues to be useful, even if all the oligarchs go away.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#44

Post by marcus_holmes »

strictnein wrote: post #34
marcus_holmes wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA helped form the UN as specifically the organisation to do exactly this kind of thing. It's a shame the current administration can't play nicely with others. The current administration is also playing strange games about export controls (can we run Fable yet? Kinda. Maybe). I think if they keep this up they'll just be shooting the US AI industry in the foot and the Chinese models will take over as the frontier…

The US formed the UN to distribute funds? > Maybe the UN can levy the USA for this The UN has no "levy" powers.

True, good point.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#45

Post by marcus_holmes »

antonvs wrote: post #22
marcus_holmes wrote: post #2

This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " I'm in Australia. I've contributed my share of dirt to the delta. Why do I not get a share of this? I get that the frontier companies are (for the moment) US companies. But that's just corporate ownership, it's not what we're talking about. We're talking about compensating the people who wrote the training data for…

> I'd happily trade my collected years of shitposts to help folks get out of poverty. In other words, you'd happily do nothing to help folks get out of poverty?

I was referring to the potential of actually collecting some of this fund. But yes, essentially in this situation that is correct - I would be doing nothing and also helping people get out of poverty.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#46

Post by supriyo-biswas »

stale2002 wrote: post #41

I'm surprised that the Author has missed a very important corollary to the diffusion of "genius theft" that they are bringing up. And that is the diffusion of the beneficiaries. Maybe they think that OpenAI and Anthropic are actually worth, like a trillion dollars each and can therefore have value extracted from them. I'm not so convinced. What if there aren't frontier labs spending billions on training a model. What…

> these labs are creating a public good as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a commodity, product or service that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous and which is typically provided by a government and paid for through taxation.

I can see that we are already excluding people from using models, whether it's China[1] or use in other harnesses[2] so its use can't be considered "non-excludable" or "non-rivalrous". It is also neither provided by the government nor funded through taxation.

I guess one change could be made to force LLM companies to release their (N-1)th model publicly and document architecture and system requirements, which would shift this to make these products actually public goods, however.

[1] https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2025997928242811253

[2] https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/anthropic-openclaw-ban-oauth-...

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#47

Post by marcus_holmes »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #42
marcus_holmes wrote: post #2

This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " I'm in Australia. I've contributed my share of dirt to the delta. Why do I not get a share of this? I get that the frontier companies are (for the moment) US companies. But that's just corporate ownership, it's not what we're talking about. We're talking about compensating the people who wrote the training data for…

> This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " There could be so many other ways to set this up. Enforce a higher tax on any business selling AI models that have capabilities greater than some threshold, and use it to fund development and infrastructure project like roads, hospitals, schools, etc. Or you could even do a negative income tax[1]. [1] https://en.…

Agreed. And someone has to manage and enforce that on a global level. Which is what we built the UN for.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#48

Post by antonvs »

abalashov wrote: post #33
martialg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you kindly I’m working through thoughts on this as well and agree with your read on the incentives. There is an interesting set of conditions that happens if/when models get so competent that they’re effectively indistinguishable from each other and inference becomes a true commodity. IRL impact will lag this ofc but it’s such a wild time to be alive.

I do think it's easy, in this technology discussion bubble in which we dwell, to overestimate the centrality of LLMs to the arc of developments in our time. They'll be important, but I don't think they'll be _that_ important, because the rest of society and the economy don't move at the speed of SV. Instead, they'll be overtaken by other, more traditional categories of events, ruptures and dislocations. Moreover, fol…

Functionally speaking, current models are intelligent by any reasonable definition of the term.

You can test them on their understanding of complex domains such as software systems, and within that domain as an example, you can judge them on their ability to diagnose bugs, fix bugs, explain code to humans, design systems given vague specifications, and implement new systems. On all these tasks, current models are measurably superhuman compared to the average human software developer.

You could make a better case that it’s humans that don’t possess true intelligence.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#49

Post by schnitzelstoat »

The troubles over copyright infringement in AI training data remind me a bit of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin.

There he suffered massive patent infringement, that basically stopped being enforced due to the sheer economic importance of the cotton gin.

In a similar manner, I think there is a reasonably strong argument that it was wrong to use copyrighted material for AI training without paying royalties nor even asking for permission. But equally, every country wants to have the most powerful models and enforcing such royalties would make it effectively impossible to train them as the amount of material required would cost an insane amount in royalty fees.

So I expect the law will continue to turn a blind eye (perhaps enforcing some token payments like that $1.5B mentioned in the article) because "if we don't make these models, the Chinese will" etc.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#50

Post by inigyou »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #47
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " There could be so many other ways to set this up. Enforce a higher tax on any business selling AI models that have capabilities greater than some threshold, and use it to fund development and infrastructure project like roads, hospitals, schools, etc. Or you could even do a negative income tax[1]. [1] https://en.…

Agreed. And someone has to manage and enforce that on a global level. Which is what we built the UN for.

The UN is a voluntary association with no enforcement power, like the EU, the WIPO, and the IETF
Post reply on HN