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OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’

theguardian.com

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Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’

#91

Post by [deleted] »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #83
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the aggregate tax burden. You're a long-term value investor because you live in a country where stock trading is an easy and low-friction thing the average person can do. A 5% transaction tax isn't really compatible with that; we would end up regressing to the global norm, where stocks are an esoteric hobby for rich people and the normal way to save for retirement is a savings account or cash piles und…

>where stocks are an esoteric hobby for rich people Isn't it something when here in the USA : •Top 10% own 90% of stock marketcap •Top 1% own 50% " " ---- You were saying? ---- I am healthily "median," which is somehow not middle class, anymore ! My neighborhood is second-worse quintile =| 70%+ Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck (stat from 2022!) – it's higher on my suburban street (I'm one of only two, " not ", out…

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’

#92

Post by ethbr1 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #64
linguae wrote: post #48

I 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.

> 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.

That would be the right way of doing this, if the government were interested.

Tax closed-model AI companies, buy Nvidia/AMD/Google hardware, build open-access datacenters, and offer access to academic labs with the caveat that resultant models must be open source.

Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’

#93

Post by [deleted] »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #83
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the aggregate tax burden. You're a long-term value investor because you live in a country where stock trading is an easy and low-friction thing the average person can do. A 5% transaction tax isn't really compatible with that; we would end up regressing to the global norm, where stocks are an esoteric hobby for rich people and the normal way to save for retirement is a savings account or cash piles und…

>where stocks are an esoteric hobby for rich people Isn't it something when here in the USA : •Top 10% own 90% of stock marketcap •Top 1% own 50% " " ---- You were saying? ---- I am healthily "median," which is somehow not middle class, anymore ! My neighborhood is second-worse quintile =| 70%+ Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck (stat from 2022!) – it's higher on my suburban street (I'm one of only two, " not ", out…

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’

#94

Post by CodingJeebus »

larsnystrom wrote: post #31
bilekas wrote: post #21

This feels a bit off.. How is the government supposed to be able to regulate them impartially when they're literally invested in them. What if a competitive startup startup starts to really take away from OpenAi's profits and then all of a sudden requires some approval for merger with Anthropic for example, I don't know if I would trust the government to be fair in their decision here. Leaving aside the potential for…

I assume that’s why Altman wants the government as a co-owner.

Not to mention that a government ownership stake also incentivizes a bailout if this all goes bust.

Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’

#95

Post by nok22kon »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #85
nok22kon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the choice is progressively giving more of the company to the government, or the government taking it by force it was long predicted that it is inevitable for national governments to fully nationalize AI labs and put them under military control

We have had for decades any number of defense contractors in the U.S. not taken by force by the U.S. They seem to have, nonetheless, happily produced what the military was wanting to purchase. I'm not sure what's different here.

no US defense contractor can threaten the US government

which is why no US defense contractor is given unsupervised access to nukes, even when maintaining them

Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’

#97

Post by trymas »

elil17 wrote: post #45

It seems that the US may be in a process of signing itself up for many of the drawbacks of Chinese-style state capitalism (regulatory conflicts of interest, opportunities for politicians to rent-seek) with stakes small enough that the taxpayer will see little real economic benefit.

This.

Though I’d say US is speeding with reimplementation of ruzzian style oligarchy (already happening with open corruption between government and broligarchs) with flavor of Chinese capitalism (this article).

Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’

#98

Post by sbayg »

ragebol wrote: post #68
ragebol wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why assume it wouldn’t sell shares? If the state can take 5% ownership, it can sell that 5% for profit, and come back for another 5% next year. Ideally the rules on when to sell would be systematic, or made by a neutral bipartisan committee of advisors, but I suspect maybe it would be just be up to the treasury (like the crypto it now holds).

Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’

#99

Post by fuzzfactor »

I_am_tiberius wrote: post #84
AJRF wrote: post #63

I 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 i…

Russian Oligarchy is actually the best comparison there is.

There's a huge difference between being shaken down highway robbery style "versus" pre-emptively paying the toll in advance for safe passage.

I guess.

It may not be obvious but isn't one unethical and the other not so much?

For some operators they may highly prefer circumstances where it's impossible to tell the difference though.

Re: OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’

#100

Post by ralferoo »

oliver-rock wrote: post #23
Traster wrote: post #11

Interesting. But if Sam really believes that the US public should share in the benefits of AI surely the number should be 50% not 5%.

Why 50% and not 100%? The obvious answer is it creates strange incentives. Maybe something like 5% across the board for all large tech companies make sense?

Or instead, they could just continue the simple route of taxing companies via corporation tax and dividend tax without having to worry about ownership at all.
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