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The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book writt

by drooby 7mo ago

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 when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction." We are in exactly that window right now with AI. The resource is being extracted at an incredible pace and almost all the value is flowing to a handful of companies. The longer people wait to assert sovereign ownership over the collective intelligence that makes AI possible, the harder it becomes. If you think this is crazy, ask yourself what’s actually crazier: demanding a share of the value built on your collective labor, or watching trillions of dollars get extracted from it and saying nothing. the idea of Alaskans getting a check just for existing sounded crazy too, right up until it didn’t.

drooby 7mo ago
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.
- rybosworld 7mo ago
  > the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space The same line of reasoning that purports billionaires will flee if their taxes go up. Spoiler alert: they don't. Also, data centers in space is not a serious idea. It's been beaten to death that this isn't economical. People like Musk are proposing that as a possibility for the sole reason of keeping regulation away. "Well if you regulate us we will just move into space". They won't because they can't because physics.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    Ah yes, we'll depend on the democratic nations of the free world to protect our rights over the billionaires. looks at the US Well, looks like we lost that.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  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 now entropy. Lose control of that entropy and it now belongs to anyone with the proper tooling to record it. This is a universal law of information, it is beyond the laws of men and their fickle will. Much like we build on information from our past generations, AI will build its own new information on those foundations. And since AI is an entity of information alone it is highly probable it will do it far better than we will and forever cement us in a prison of our own making.
  - drooby 7mo ago
    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" doesn't make contract law disappear. We decided collectively that people and institutions can own ideas, and we built the modern economy on that decision. You can argue that's a fiction, but it's a fiction that everything around you depends on. You can't invoke "universal laws of information" to dismiss public claims to training data while the companies training on it aggressively enforce their own IP. They patent their architectures. They copyright their outputs. They sue competitors for misuse. They clearly believe in ownership of non-physical objects when it benefits them. You don't get it both ways.
    - vibrio 7mo ago
      (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?
- gwerbin 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - expedition32 7mo ago
    We will move them to Bahrain!
PunchyHamster 7mo ago
Can't really do that for AI. What you gonna do, tax their use of scraped data ? How would even that be implemented ?
- drooby 7mo ago
  The same way Alaska taxes oil extraction. Alaska doesn't track which molecule of oil came from which acre. They don't audit every drop. They tax the extraction operation and collect royalties on the resource being pulled out of the ground. We know who is training large models. We know roughly what data they're using. We know their revenue. A compute tax on large training runs, a revenue royalty on foundation model companies, or a licensing fee above a certain data threshold... none of these require tracking individual data points. They require taxing the extraction operation, which is visible, measurable, and already being monitored to some degree for safety purposes. We already have a very analogous model in the form of oil and Alaska. Edit: to clarify, this wouldn't be a tax. A tax is the government taking a cut of someone else's money. A royalty is the owner charging for access to their resource. Alaska doesn't tax Exxon for drilling. It charges Exxon for extracting something that belongs to the people. Same principle here.
jdross 7mo ago
We usually just call this collective extraction “taxes”
- drooby 7mo ago
  A tax takes a percentage of value that someone else created. A royalty collects payment for access to something you already own. When Alaska collects from oil companies, it's not taxing their profits. It's charging them for extracting a resource that belongs to the people of Alaska. The oil was never theirs. It being a royalty and not a tax is the reason Alaska's dividend is politically untouchable while tax-funded programs get gutted every budget cycle. Ownership is a fundamentally stronger claim than redistribution.
terminalshort 7mo ago
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.
- drooby 7mo ago
  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 recognize that the people who made it deserve compensation when others profit from it. The entire IP enforcement apparatus is built on exactly that principle. Non-rivalrous doesn't mean non-exploitable.
  - terminalshort 7mo ago
    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.
    - drooby 7mo ago
      Nobody is proposing that AI companies track down individual contributors and pay them based on their specific contribution. That's not how any of this works. The Alaska Permanent Fund doesn't pay Alaskans based on how much oil was under their particular backyard. It pays a dividend from a public fund because the resource is collectively owned. The mechanism is simple: companies extract a public resource, a percentage goes into a fund, the fund pays out to the public. And the infrastructure comparison doesn't quite work. The people who built computing hardware and internet infrastructure were paid for that work at market rates by the companies that hired them. The billions of people whose writing, code, images, and knowledge trained these models weren't paid anything for that specific use. That gap is the whole point.
WarmWash 7mo ago
This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is. Every human uses that "resource" to train themselves, and now they use AI to supercharge that consumption. The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin? I get the gatekeepers are pissed, LLMs are way cheaper than those expensive gate fees, and I cannot come up with a good faith argument about how giving the power of SOTA LLMs to anyone for $20/mo is somehow evil or bad. In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream. If you want UBI, then the framing shouldn't be around "whoever had content on the internet circa 2024 is entitled to lifetime AI company payouts that effectively act as permanent unemployment checks."
- shimman 7mo ago
  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 rather than benefiting the few. Democracy means there is a politics of rejection, rejection is normal in functioning democracies; what isn't normal are small handfuls of people capturing all collective human intelligence then claiming only they are allowed to benefit from it.
  - WarmWash 7mo ago
    Democratize means to make something available to everyone. I suppose the root of the word is from democracy, everyone gets a vote/equal rights, but the meaning doesn't really have anything to do with politics or government... So to reframe my argument for clarity; I have a hard time coming up with an honest critique of why giving everyone incredibly cheap access (often free!) to incredibly powerful LLMs is somehow evil. And obviously these things are ridiculously popular. Average people seem to think they are fucking awesome, and anger seems to be mostly from gatekeepers that are relentlessly screaming that their gates are being bypassed for pennies.
baxtr 7mo ago
> if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value Isn't that how communism (should have) worked?
- drooby 7mo ago
  Alaska and Norway aren't communist. They're capitalist economies with thriving private sectors. Oil companies still operate, still profit, still compete. The public just gets a share of the value extracted from a collectively owned resource. The Alaska Permanent Fund has been running since 1982 inside the most conservative state in America. Norway's sovereign wealth fund is the largest on earth and their economy is doing fine. These models work.. work well... And they exist comfortably within mixed market economies. The question is whether the public gets a cut when private companies build fortunes on a collectively generated resource, or whether they don't. We already know the answer can be yes without anything breaking. Our entire white collar system might be a house of cards with AI, what I am proposing is a safe hedge against a future with potentially massive wealth inequality, and increased unemployment. But this isn't just about protection from injury... people should BENEFIT massively.
  - baxtr 7mo ago
    ok, fair enough. I think I misread your first comment. not sure if that would work in this case since all these companies scraped (publicly) available data? So with the right resources anyone could redo it?
    - drooby 7mo ago
      Well, two things worth considering. First, training isn't a one-time event. These companies are continuously scraping new data, training new model generations, ingesting new human output. Every new model is a new extraction event. The fact that GPT-4 already trained on your 2022 blog post doesn't mean the window is closed. GPT-6 will train on your 2025 and 2026 output too. There's always a live point at which to assert a collective claim. Likely - these models will always be training on us to better understand us and continue to be of value to us commercially. Second, "anyone could redo it with the right resources" is technically true but practically meaningless. Anyone could theoretically drill for oil too. The barrier was never access to the crude sitting in the ground. It was the billions in infrastructure needed to extract and refine it. Same here. The data is public, but the compute required to turn it into a frontier model costs billions. That concentration of capital is exactly why a public claim on the value makes sense, just like it did with oil.
bgnn 7mo ago
> Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction." This is also true for the first commercially exploited natural gas fields in the world, in the Netherlands. This ruined the Dutch manufacturing industry, and became a textbook example of tge development of one sector harming others known as Dutch disease []. AI has a great potential like this too.. [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
- drooby 7mo ago
  This is a great point. The Netherlands is the cautionary tale of what happens when you don't do what Alaska and Norway did. A massive resource boom without proper public management hollowed out the rest of the economy. If a handful of companies capture most of the value from AI while it simultaneously displaces workers across every other sector, that's Dutch disease applied to the entire knowledge economy. One sector booms, everything else withers.

by drooby 7mo ago

drooby 7mo ago

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.

rybosworld 7mo ago
> the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space The same line of reasoning that purports billionaires will flee if their taxes go up. Spoiler alert: they don't. Also, data centers in space is not a serious idea. It's been beaten to death that this isn't economical. People like Musk are proposing that as a possibility for the sole reason of keeping regulation away. "Well if you regulate us we will just move into space". They won't because they can't because physics.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  Ah yes, we'll depend on the democratic nations of the free world to protect our rights over the billionaires. looks at the US Well, looks like we lost that.
pixl97 7mo ago
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 now entropy. Lose control of that entropy and it now belongs to anyone with the proper tooling to record it. This is a universal law of information, it is beyond the laws of men and their fickle will. Much like we build on information from our past generations, AI will build its own new information on those foundations. And since AI is an entity of information alone it is highly probable it will do it far better than we will and forever cement us in a prison of our own making.
- drooby 7mo ago
  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" doesn't make contract law disappear. We decided collectively that people and institutions can own ideas, and we built the modern economy on that decision. You can argue that's a fiction, but it's a fiction that everything around you depends on. You can't invoke "universal laws of information" to dismiss public claims to training data while the companies training on it aggressively enforce their own IP. They patent their architectures. They copyright their outputs. They sue competitors for misuse. They clearly believe in ownership of non-physical objects when it benefits them. You don't get it both ways.
  - vibrio 7mo ago
    (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?
gwerbin 7mo ago
> 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.
- expedition32 7mo ago
  We will move them to Bahrain!

PunchyHamster 7mo ago

Can't really do that for AI. What you gonna do, tax their use of scraped data ? How would even that be implemented ?

drooby 7mo ago
The same way Alaska taxes oil extraction. Alaska doesn't track which molecule of oil came from which acre. They don't audit every drop. They tax the extraction operation and collect royalties on the resource being pulled out of the ground. We know who is training large models. We know roughly what data they're using. We know their revenue. A compute tax on large training runs, a revenue royalty on foundation model companies, or a licensing fee above a certain data threshold... none of these require tracking individual data points. They require taxing the extraction operation, which is visible, measurable, and already being monitored to some degree for safety purposes. We already have a very analogous model in the form of oil and Alaska. Edit: to clarify, this wouldn't be a tax. A tax is the government taking a cut of someone else's money. A royalty is the owner charging for access to their resource. Alaska doesn't tax Exxon for drilling. It charges Exxon for extracting something that belongs to the people. Same principle here.

jdross 7mo ago

We usually just call this collective extraction “taxes”

drooby 7mo ago
A tax takes a percentage of value that someone else created. A royalty collects payment for access to something you already own. When Alaska collects from oil companies, it's not taxing their profits. It's charging them for extracting a resource that belongs to the people of Alaska. The oil was never theirs. It being a royalty and not a tax is the reason Alaska's dividend is politically untouchable while tax-funded programs get gutted every budget cycle. Ownership is a fundamentally stronger claim than redistribution.

terminalshort 7mo ago

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.

drooby 7mo ago
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 recognize that the people who made it deserve compensation when others profit from it. The entire IP enforcement apparatus is built on exactly that principle. Non-rivalrous doesn't mean non-exploitable.
- terminalshort 7mo ago
  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.
  - drooby 7mo ago
    Nobody is proposing that AI companies track down individual contributors and pay them based on their specific contribution. That's not how any of this works. The Alaska Permanent Fund doesn't pay Alaskans based on how much oil was under their particular backyard. It pays a dividend from a public fund because the resource is collectively owned. The mechanism is simple: companies extract a public resource, a percentage goes into a fund, the fund pays out to the public. And the infrastructure comparison doesn't quite work. The people who built computing hardware and internet infrastructure were paid for that work at market rates by the companies that hired them. The billions of people whose writing, code, images, and knowledge trained these models weren't paid anything for that specific use. That gap is the whole point.

WarmWash 7mo ago

This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is. Every human uses that "resource" to train themselves, and now they use AI to supercharge that consumption. The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin? I get the gatekeepers are pissed, LLMs are way cheaper than those expensive gate fees, and I cannot come up with a good faith argument about how giving the power of SOTA LLMs to anyone for $20/mo is somehow evil or bad. In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream. If you want UBI, then the framing shouldn't be around "whoever had content on the internet circa 2024 is entitled to lifetime AI company payouts that effectively act as permanent unemployment checks."

shimman 7mo ago
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 rather than benefiting the few. Democracy means there is a politics of rejection, rejection is normal in functioning democracies; what isn't normal are small handfuls of people capturing all collective human intelligence then claiming only they are allowed to benefit from it.
- WarmWash 7mo ago
  Democratize means to make something available to everyone. I suppose the root of the word is from democracy, everyone gets a vote/equal rights, but the meaning doesn't really have anything to do with politics or government... So to reframe my argument for clarity; I have a hard time coming up with an honest critique of why giving everyone incredibly cheap access (often free!) to incredibly powerful LLMs is somehow evil. And obviously these things are ridiculously popular. Average people seem to think they are fucking awesome, and anger seems to be mostly from gatekeepers that are relentlessly screaming that their gates are being bypassed for pennies.

baxtr 7mo ago

> if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value Isn't that how communism (should have) worked?

drooby 7mo ago
Alaska and Norway aren't communist. They're capitalist economies with thriving private sectors. Oil companies still operate, still profit, still compete. The public just gets a share of the value extracted from a collectively owned resource. The Alaska Permanent Fund has been running since 1982 inside the most conservative state in America. Norway's sovereign wealth fund is the largest on earth and their economy is doing fine. These models work.. work well... And they exist comfortably within mixed market economies. The question is whether the public gets a cut when private companies build fortunes on a collectively generated resource, or whether they don't. We already know the answer can be yes without anything breaking. Our entire white collar system might be a house of cards with AI, what I am proposing is a safe hedge against a future with potentially massive wealth inequality, and increased unemployment. But this isn't just about protection from injury... people should BENEFIT massively.
- baxtr 7mo ago
  ok, fair enough. I think I misread your first comment. not sure if that would work in this case since all these companies scraped (publicly) available data? So with the right resources anyone could redo it?
  - drooby 7mo ago
    Well, two things worth considering. First, training isn't a one-time event. These companies are continuously scraping new data, training new model generations, ingesting new human output. Every new model is a new extraction event. The fact that GPT-4 already trained on your 2022 blog post doesn't mean the window is closed. GPT-6 will train on your 2025 and 2026 output too. There's always a live point at which to assert a collective claim. Likely - these models will always be training on us to better understand us and continue to be of value to us commercially. Second, "anyone could redo it with the right resources" is technically true but practically meaningless. Anyone could theoretically drill for oil too. The barrier was never access to the crude sitting in the ground. It was the billions in infrastructure needed to extract and refine it. Same here. The data is public, but the compute required to turn it into a frontier model costs billions. That concentration of capital is exactly why a public claim on the value makes sense, just like it did with oil.

bgnn 7mo ago

> Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction." This is also true for the first commercially exploited natural gas fields in the world, in the Netherlands. This ruined the Dutch manufacturing industry, and became a textbook example of tge development of one sector harming others known as Dutch disease []. AI has a great potential like this too.. [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

drooby 7mo ago
This is a great point. The Netherlands is the cautionary tale of what happens when you don't do what Alaska and Norway did. A massive resource boom without proper public management hollowed out the rest of the economy. If a handful of companies capture most of the value from AI while it simultaneously displaces workers across every other sector, that's Dutch disease applied to the entire knowledge economy. One sector booms, everything else withers.