This is 9 years old. Shows that Sam Altman has been thinking about this for a while https://blog.samaltman.com/american-equity
Discussed also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15789108.
OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’
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Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’
#62I know OpenAI has delayed their IPO by a year (i.e. not publicly traded, yet; so: no dividends), but wouldn't it be better for the Government/bottom 95% if instead of taking ownership, they taxed all tech-related stocks 5% every time they're traded – this is a perpetual stream of income, and would likely reduce speculative short-term trading... source: middle-aged electrician, owns a little stock (and would happily p…
An interesting proposition. Not sure if the outcome would be good, though; one result could be that "tech-related stocks" just stop being traded directly by bigger players, and people instead trade assets that hold such stocks (which reduces trade volume, and might result in the "trade tax" only being paid by small traders like you).
I find the concept of taxing stock trades in general interesting, but I believe it could have a bunch of undesirable side-effects.
Another really appealing tax suggestion IMO is the Zucman approach: You tax wealth at 2%, but deduct all the income tax from this. The motivation is that for the very wealthy, "nominal" taxable income is basically zero; and approach like this would take a fair cut from stock billionaires, while keeping things mostly unchanged for normal people.
Off-topic (asking as a foreigner): Does "eats crayons" imply a stint in the US Marines here, or can the phrase be used for non-military personnel, too?
Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’
#63I sound conspiratorial - but everything happening in the US around AI + Crypto has the fingerprints of David Sacks and Theil on it. You can hear them talk about these things and then they happen.
Sacks has talked extensively about the US government having stakes in tech companies for months and months on the All In pod.
It seems like saw Russian Oligarchs and instead of being morally repulsed they thought "hmm that is quite nice, I would like that"
Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’
#64I may be naïve or completely uninformed, but given the federal government’s vast resources, including supercomputers, national laboratories, the NSA, and many talented employees, why does the federal government need OpenAI or Anthropic for that matter when it has the resources to build its own LLM, even one exclusive for government use? The federal government has a long history of technical feats, such as the atomic…
Supercomputers aren't useful for training LLMs, and the best researchers would have politically infeasible pay requirements. I'm sure the government could acquire a bunch of GPUs and make it happen, if for some reason we had to, but it's easier to do outside of the government.
Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’
#65I know OpenAI has delayed their IPO by a year (i.e. not publicly traded, yet; so: no dividends), but wouldn't it be better for the Government/bottom 95% if instead of taking ownership, they taxed all tech-related stocks 5% every time they're traded – this is a perpetual stream of income, and would likely reduce speculative short-term trading... source: middle-aged electrician, owns a little stock (and would happily p…
That's a terrifying idea that would destroy the tech stock market as we know it. We already have incentives in capital gain taxes to encourage longer term ownership. Feel free to send a 5% donation to the government in your taxes every time you trade your tech stocks.
This is an order of magnitude less than Bernie's 50% per-tech-trade tax (obviously impossible & bad), which he suggested as a means to fund the inevitable UBI [turns out former presidentical candiate Michael Yang wasn't wrong, just early, with his 2020 prediction].
Having never sold any stock on a short-term basis (i.e. I am a long-term value investor), I also disagree on the abysmally low tax rates I pay for long-term selling. To paraphrase the great Warren Buffet: the ultrarich should be taxed more and its unfair that the taxcodes don't require it.
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Having spent the majority of my working life as a bluecollar electrician, I can assure that my wagie tax burden (as percentage of income) is much higher than most fellow employed-by-tech readers, here.
Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’
#66Interesting. But if Sam really believes that the US public should share in the benefits of AI surely the number should be 50% not 5%.
What's your basis for conflating government ownership with public benefit?
Seems to me like it creates a lot of perverse incentives.
Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what would happen if no bailout came? I did not keep count of how many trillion USD they owe, but if we let OpenAI fail, what would be the consequences for ordinary people?
Nothing If OAI blew up now a whole lotta of people who supplied money would be angry. But those people are generally not the common person But the pushback will be — ‘but china!’
Sure because never ever in history losses of rich people and companies have been socialized and have been assumed by those "risk takers".
Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’
#68This is 9 years old. Shows that Sam Altman has been thinking about this for a while https://blog.samaltman.com/american-equity
Discussed also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15789108 .
Besides direct control, what could a dividend on the profits do what a well-proportioned corporate tax on profits cannot do? The state would only get dividends assuming it would not sell shares.
And the state can exert control much more fairly (ie. to all competitors as well) with regulation and laws.
Regulations and taxes are seen as 'un-american' I suppose, while giving stock to the government is not somehow?
Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’
#69In a proper capitalist society the government defines the rules of the market, aligned with the interests of several parties, and then companies compete within that well regulated and fair environment. The only incentive the government should have is to grow the entire market, so that they can collect more tax. There might be minor exceptions to protect key industries like food production or defense, but these should…
This is a vision of 'proper' but certainly not the only one. Another version many of the very rich would like to see is given below.
In a proper capitalist society the capitalists define the rules of the market by competing to own the most politicians. The capitalists best at buying political influence get a larger say in what the rules will be so as to align them with their specific interests regardless of damage to others. When rules are aligned to your specific interests, this is called a well regulated and fair environment. Otherwise it is called a repressive nanny-state deep state swamp. The only incentive the government should have is to grow the politicians' personal wealth by bargaining with capitalists for which policies get enacted. There are no exceptions to protect key industries like food production. Defense spending is, however, in most capitalists interests as they often need the use of violent force to eliminate or subsume competition in other nations. Defense will therefore always receive robust funding.
Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Taxes are theft lol what a weird way to start this post
Objectively it’s absurd to have an organization take a significant portion of your money on threat of imprisonment just to invest it in a corporation
The state / government is the only reason they're able to have money and profits in the first place.
There literally was no state (in its modern sense) until private property and the capitalist market. Feudalism or the Roman empire had an entirely different structure. The development of the modern state happened in concert with the development of classical liberal ideology, acts of enclosure, private property, and the capitalist market system.
Capitalism needs the state, taxes, police, and the military to coordinate competing interests, maintain property laws and social order, and to ensure its own stability generally.
... Now, what Trump and Bessent and Lutnick are busy engineering is a bit beyond that -- rentier / parasitical capitalism in which the state acts more like a committee of oligarchs taking a cut for themselves than a "neutral" cabinet of technocrats seeking market stability.