10 ms·

The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

• taco_emoji 4mo ago
  Can we wait till after the bubble pops and see what pieces are left on the floor?
• alphawhisky 4mo ago
  Bernard, this may not be the best time. This market is gonna go nuclear...
  • Helloworldboy 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
• Arubis 4mo ago
  Strictly speaking, the big A.I. companies _want_ the public to own half of them. Passively. In index ETFs in their 401(k)s and other retirement portfolios. That way the get all the money without any of the actual influence.
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • triceratops 4mo ago
    Sure but they want the public to pay for the privilege of owning half.
    • Arubis 4mo ago
      Oh yes. Very much so. And ideally without thinking or actively having to choose—hence the get-on-the-index-funds angle.
• onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
  Why half of AI and not half of Walmart & Exxon & Apple? Government spending is already ~40% of GDP. And what do we get with this half? A sovereign wealth fund? That seems like a great tool for a certain corrupt politician to use as a carrot to make CEO's bend to his/her whims. What benefit does that have for anyone else? You can't build a sovereign wealth fund if you're transferring all the money out. That's just more government spending, not a wealth fund...
  • TehCorwiz 4mo ago
    Because AI companies basically took everything we ever wrote, drew, recorded, posted, or thought and turned it into a product with the power to lie, propagandize, and manipulate the public with zero oversight. Walmart is a parasite using welfare to subsidize their operations but they didn't tell a judge that they were immune to copyright because they stole just so much damn information.
    • chrischen 4mo ago
      Yes but all the AI companies took all the public data, so when you pay for an AI model you are paying for the marginal service of building a model off that data, not for the data itself. What we should do is ensure that the data is available to more people to train AI models... but sadly this doesn't seem to be happening. Instead AI companies that were first-movers got to train off public data, and as the companies and businesses that own this data get wise they're going to start charging people to train off the data. This will make it much more difficult for anyone to train a model in the future as it will become expensive, and the companies that did happen to already train off public data will get a bit of incumbent's advantage.
      • forbiddenvoid 4mo ago
        I don't really buy this argument. When you buy a physical product, you are paying the entire product lifecycle, not just the marginal aspect of retail distribution. This is the same thing. The marginal inference has to come FROM somewhere. It doesn't just appear out of nowhere.
• axus 4mo ago
  Wouldn't taxes give more to the public than nationalization? I'd like the benefits of Communism without the downsides. There are efficiency benefits to the government owning stock vs. using the IRS for collection, that part I like. But I don't trust the US gov to use stock voting rights wisely.
  • triceratops 4mo ago
    > But I don't trust the US gov to use stock voting rights wisely. What if it got ownership without voting rights?
• scottyah 4mo ago
  As long as they're non-voting shares, I don't see the harm. I assume not enough politicians in this senator's camp were given their early cut so this is retribution/a lesson to the abstract "Big Tech" to show that DC is still the city that rules the world.
  • thewebguyd 4mo ago
    Why non-voting shares? That kind of defeats the point of partial ownership. If the models were built using the output of all of human effort over time, then society at large should absolutely have a voice in the direction of the companies. This tech should be made for public benefit, not for purely profit and private interests. Quite frankly, most companies should be worker co-ops instead, and its long passed time we start moving to that model.
    • triceratops 4mo ago
      > Why non-voting shares? That kind of defeats the point of partial ownership. Not really, no. Ownership gets you a share of the profits and profits can be used to reduce income taxes. I think non-voting is wise. It prevents political and partisan meddling.
    • scottyah 4mo ago
      Anyone can start a worker co-op, and anyone can decide to shop at them. We're well past the point where anyone can argue what should be the right way to manage a company because you can just do it. I think even the franchise model is like a large scale co-op. The models just take the same information available to anyone and make it more useful, it's not like oil or mining where it's a consumable that people share, nor is it taking from the youth- in fact it's one of the best ways of utilizing the knowledge of the past. Honestly, the a lot of the people I hear complaining about having a "voice" about "output of all of human effort over time" are usually not the ones who put the information out on the web/books, as they are usually doing it for the benefit of future humans and not for profit. Seems to be the same as PMs or VCs trying to "capture the value" of other people.
• jordemort 4mo ago
  I would prefer not to
• alfiedotwtf 4mo ago
  Giving government property rights means taking away your own property rights. It’s zero sum.
  • AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
    Everybody thinks that they can get the government to take from them, but not from us.
    • triceratops 4mo ago
      They're already taking from us, if you work for a paycheck.
  • trismus 4mo ago
    I am willing to surrender some property rights for a functional distributive society, pragmatically.
    • AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
      Some. Most of us are. That's what taxes are, in fact. We have private property rights, and we have to pay taxes. The hard-core anti-tax people try to make that a contradiction; most of the rest of us don't think of it that way, so their "taxation is theft" rhetoric falls flat. But I think it's important that we keep it at some. Major erosions of private property rights in order "to tax the rich" make me nervous, because I don't want to lose those rights myself. And taking the rights from them, but I get to keep them, seems likely to not be a stable equilibrium.
      • trismus 4mo ago
        That's fine, you can be nervous. Seems like a slippery slope argument to forestall any practical positive change which doesn't directly immediately benefit you. What's actually going to happen though, is every principled parasite at the top will fight tooth and nail to protect every principled right they have while for example the health care, infrastructure, and institutions decline, and they will happily support a fascist demagogue rather than give up those rights (on principles of course! Not on pesky reality). This is not the first time around. Wealth concentrating policies rely on appealing to the middle class' fear that someone, somewhere will get a benefit that I won't. So principled! And it works. C.f. the discussion in Australia right now over whether increasing capital gains tax is 'fair'... The right is talking on principles, conveniently ignoring the massive tax breaks and regulatory capture that have resulted in huge measurable increases in wealth concentration, and justifying those spuriously as overall productivity increases. Principles for thee, pragmatism for me.
• AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
  Bernie Sanders. I mean, he's not always wrong, but he's, um, kind of enthusiastic about just taking stuff from those who have it, considerably more than the current understanding of private property (or even taxation) considers acceptable.
  • edbaskerville 4mo ago
    I think the point is that they took our collective knowledge without asking and are selling it back to us. We should own a substantial portion of it. (Not sure if this is the right approach, but the general idea seems rather important.)
  • Jordan-117 4mo ago
    The obvious counterargument is that the AI labs took virtually all human writing, imagery, music, etc., without regard for licensing or copyright. It's fair to ask what they owe back to the commons they built their models on (and which they are in some sense helping to destroy).
  • jotux 4mo ago
    >kind of enthusiastic about just taking stuff from those who have it, considerably more than the current understanding of private property (or even taxation) considers acceptable. Funny how you can use that description for how AI companies used everything for training data.
    • akramachamarei 4mo ago
      Can you? If the government decides to take another grand, that's money I can't use. If I publish a blog post about why I hate videogames, and an AI company trains a model on it, I still have my article, I still have the same number of people who could find it and care about it a particular amount. Maybe some of them will forgo reading my article because they got the same thing from the LLM, but the description of these two actions is not nearly the same. This is why intellectual "property" is a metaphor. Economists call this a nonrivalrous good. IP law seeks to make such things more rivalrous, FBOFW.
    • 4mo ago
• rayiner 4mo ago
  Why does the public have a right to expropriate the property if AI companies specifically, as opposed to other types of companies? Just make broad rules that apply to everyone based on abstract principles. I’m fine even with very liberal economic approaches. If we want to raise corporate tax rates to 30%, fine, do that. Want to get creative? Half the equity of every company goes into a public fund. But this case by case, “sure is a nice company you got there” stuff is third-world shit.
  • bitwize 4mo ago
    The idea is that AI companies expropriated our labor to train their sloppotrons first. But given that this is Bernie, it's probably a stalking horse for future expropriations from other industries later.
    • csallen 4mo ago
      What labor did any of us have to get up and go do for the AI companies?
      • jst1fthsdys 4mo ago
        Produced the corpus of knowledge they trained on.
        • csallen 4mo ago
          The fact that somebody benefited from the output of your work is not the same thing as extracting your labor. Extracting your labor means that before you even create the work, they're conscripting you to do it. For example, I created a useful organization at my school before I graduated. That was twenty years ago. It still exists, and people are still benefiting from it. But they don't somehow owe me compensation, nor would I go around saying that they're somehow exploiting me or expropriating my labor just because they're benefiting from what I've done in the past.
          • 4mo ago
• feverzsj 4mo ago
  Only if it's AGI, which is astronomically impossible.
  • fhdkweig 4mo ago
    I don't think LLMs will be the path to AGI, but anything nature can already build (a human mind) is proven to be possible. After that, it is just a science and engineering problem to replicate. There are those who believe that a human mind is somehow magic and a special exception to the laws of physics, but I am not one of those people.
    • josefritzishere 4mo ago
      If we could only agree on what consciousness even is. Engineers can't build things that we can't define. Even the dictionary definition is tautological. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-does-consciousness-come-from-two-neuroscience-theories-go-head-to-head/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-does-consci...
• deaton 4mo ago
  This sounds like the new "thats people's retirement," because if we convert 50% of every AI company into a sovereign wealth fund (which is already a questionable seizure anyway), suddenly it will become politically untenable to do anything that might put that fund in danger, like... regulating anything, or even not bailing out a company thats struggling.
  • none2585 4mo ago
    If a 1T company struggles do you really think we (the US) wouldn't bail them out just like the banks and the auto industry?
• fny 4mo ago
  > A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations I know many here would scoff at nationalizing a private company, but AI is a usurpation of human knowledge and quite literally at times. (Every AI company was embroiled in copyright lawsuits and lord knows what Qwen et al are up to.) In turn, everyone knows labor displacement is coming. My bet is the next recession will end up being brutal for this reason. To me, labor displacement and the social consequences are a potentially *catastrophic* negative externality. Should not there be a tax to offset the "frictional" unemployment? What happens when people lose a high skill job and will no longer be able to afford their mortgage? Also, why are people always talking about AI as if its an angel or satan? The degree to which we're doomed is an open question, much like a tornado... so why aren't we thinking about taxes on AI like a tornado insurance fund?
  • fhdkweig 4mo ago
    You can tax something without owning it. It is the owning part that bothers me. It implies that the government is going to shovel ridiculous amounts of money into these things and when the bubble finally pops We The People get nothing out of it.
    • dylan604 4mo ago
      That sounds like a brilliant idea if you're a board member of one of these companies.
    • fny 4mo ago
      Taxing X% ownership means you get X%. You don't pay for it. So if the bubble pops, you still get X% ownership. To your point, it may be smarter to tax the IPO valuation and buy more later.
      • fhdkweig 4mo ago
        I'm mostly commenting on the story a few days ago regarding having index funds change their rules to automatically purchase shares in the impending IPOs so that passive investors would end up buying shares without their direct knowledge. It struck me as a way for executives to cash out of what they know is a bubble. A lot of people in that thread didn't seem to have any issue with that.
• new_account_104 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• pessimizer 4mo ago
  I am repulsed by this because it will obviously be the vehicle through which tax money will be directed into Altman & Co's pockets, but I also understand that they will get bailed out whether the government gets a share or not. As long as they are voting shares, I don't see an increase in the harm. I'd like to see a legislative framework about how that ownership is handled that allows Congress and regulatory agencies to make decisions restricting how these companies will operate, but without any regard to the constitutional rights of the corporate persons or their owners. I'm sick of the government arguing with monopolies, then taking dives. I want it to be abundantly clear that government has the ability to restrict these AI utility companies freely (such as their ability to feed on their customers), while still limiting the rights that the state has over the personal use of AI by private individuals. Partial state ownership will make that possible. Hell, let half their boards be publicly elected.
• mynameismon 4mo ago
  The public includes the rest of the world, not just a small minority living in the United States.
• slackfan 4mo ago
  The public should own half of everything that Senator Sanders owns as well.
  • trismus 4mo ago
    Pretty sure he'd be down for that
    • slackfan 4mo ago
      Drop by his residence and ask, why not.
  • skeaker 4mo ago
    Why? He makes a compelling argument for his stance, and he is of course one man, not a business. If AI companies are going to have such a profound effect on the common man, including both you and me, then why shouldn't we have a say in how they operate? I can hardly say the same for Sanders' belongings.
    • slackfan 4mo ago
      He's a multimillionaire and I am not.
      • skeaker 4mo ago
        If your point is that you're trying to parrot Sanders' beliefs in a deliberately stupid way, it isn't working, because this isn't why he thinks the public should have a stake in how AI companies are being run. It's what you think he thinks after not having read the article.
        • slackfan 4mo ago
          Or maybe I honestly believe that all millionaires should be socially responsible, regardless of their political views.
• altruios 4mo ago
  ...just half?
• morninglight 4mo ago
  The Public Should Own ALL of SpaceX.
  • Leonard_of_Q 4mo ago
    With or without paying those who made SpaceX happen?
• pesus 4mo ago
  If these companies intend to destroy the fabric of society and jobs and livelihood of everyone, then that leaves us very few choices as a society. This is one of the tamest and most peaceful ones, even if it's just a start. Hopefully Sammy and friends choose wisely.
• jmyeet 4mo ago
  People on HN generally love municipal broadband. For good reasons. It is almost without exception better than any of the national ISPs. Cheaper too. Municipal broadband is just 100% publicly-owned. That's what that means. When you have a national ISP, you might not get a service at all despite the ISP guaranteeing service in exchange for money from the state they've taken. You get a service that starts at $60 but somehow gets to $140 in a few years unless you do the annual cancel dance and if you do cancel you have no other options anyway. And what are you really paying for? Lobbying to make municipal broadband illegal. And these same people will defend the status quo because of "property rights". Nobody here is Jeff Bezos. Does it seem like things are going well? Is this a legitimate belief in unfettered property rights? Or is it just that you believe you'll be Jeff Bezos one day so you'll benefit from the status quo? This is the origin of the quote possibly misattributed to Steinbeck that Americans view themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
  • rayiner 4mo ago
    You don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to believe you’re better off in the long run with strong property rights. To your example: I’ve got 10 gig fiber from a private company. My alternatives are 2 gig fiber from a private company, or 2 gig cable from a private company. I don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to wager that, if the people who ran Baltimore City Public Schools ran my broadband service, I wouldn’t have even 1 gig service. The fact is, we have tried exactly what you’re suggesting. We don’t even need to get to the brutal communism of China or the Soviet Union. The “social democracy” of India and Bangladesh (where I’m from) left those countries’ economies in the toilet. The best case scenario for social democracy was the DDR. My wife lived for a year in former eastern germany—in 2001, when the socialist government was as far back in time as Obama’s first term is to today—and folks recall being reasonably happy under socialism. But western germany was still much more prosperous, and it took huge solidarity payments to help the former east germany catch up.
    • jmyeet 4mo ago
      The "brutal communism of China" is just hilarious on its face. It's like a Freedom House type position [1]. Funded by the State Department btw. I'm sure it's unbiased. Surveys of Chinese citizens show very high levels of satisfaction with their government [2] while Chinese people view the West through the "kill line" [3]. The funny part about that is the NYT blaming the kill line on "state media" [4] when it originated on Chinese social media. But that's how deep the anti-China propaganda goes in the US. The transformation Chinese people have seen in their daily lives in their lifetimes is something undeniable [5], liting ~800M people out of extreme poverty. What has the West done in that time? Does it seem like things are going well? So all I did was point out how people like municipal broadband and you went straight to the slippery slope fallacy "but that's communism!" without actually knowing what communism actually is it seems. The idea is pretty simple. The people should have a stake in the value they create. You know who else believes that? The US Department of Defense [6]. Is the Defense Department "Communist" too? [1]: https://freedomhouse.org/country/china https://freedomhouse.org/country/china [2]: https://ash.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/final_policy_brief_7.6.2020.pdf https://ash.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/final_pol... [3]: https://fpif.org/how-the-kill-line-redefined-the-american-dream-in-china/ https://fpif.org/how-the-kill-line-redefined-the-american-dr... [4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/business/china-american-poverty.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/business/china-american-p... [5]: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/e9a5bc3c-718d-57d8-9558-ce325407f737/content https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstrea... [6]: https://investorplace.com/dailylive/2026/06/the-pentagon-is-betting-200-billion-on-these-companies/ https://investorplace.com/dailylive/2026/06/the-pentagon-is-...
• gkoberger 4mo ago
  I don’t have an opinion on this specific proposal, but I am glad to hear a politician talking about the effects of AI. I feel like I’m going crazy sometimes. Over the next few years we will see the biggest change to employment our country has ever seen. Our entire financial structure is about to be upended, and not a single politician is talking about it. It’s so weird that all I think about is AI, yet not a single politician seems to notice. (Or maybe they do and that’s why they’re pillaging the country.)
  • dylan604 4mo ago
    > It’s so weird that all I think about is AI, Maybe this is a place to start?
• csallen 4mo ago
  I strongly dislike the belief that people should be compensated when others find ingenious ways to profit off of publicly-available data. We live in a world where "creating value" (doing things that others find helpful) and "capturing value" (getting those people to pay you money) are two different things. If I give my mom a hug, I'm creating value, but that's not necessarily something I'm going to charge her for it. Most value created by people won't ever be captured. And that's a good thing imo. It keeps the world moving, removes friction, and allows for authenticity. There's nothing wrong with wanting to capture value, of course. But the second you do that, you're a business. And "capturing value" has a huge set of tasks and responsibilities you now have to handle. But there's an intuition that has gradually built up over centuries, alongside the growth of "intellectual property" as a concept. It's best paraphrased as, "I want to be compensated for the value I create, without doing any of the work to capture it. And if someone else finds an ingenious way to capture some of the value that I've created, then they should pay me." To some degree, I understand and agree with the sentiment. Nothing is built in a vacuum. No person or company is an island. Everything is built on top of public infrastructure and works created by the country, laid by our forefathers. This is just one of many reasons why I believe in a progressive tax system. To the extent that you're able to capture large amounts of value in America, a lot of that is made possible by the infra you're building on top of, which is owned by the public, and a progressive tax system is a good way to to share that with the public. (Of course, this has its own problems, bc the government collecting taxes is not enough, it has to spend those funds wisely, for the benefit of all. Which it obviously doesn't do, at the federal level, or at many state and city levels. So I've always found it a bit perplexing for people to clamor for more taxation while caring little about how tax revenues are spent. But that's a discussion for another time.) But overall, I don't like this intuition, because it's essentially rent-seeking behavior. Capturing value is hard. Simply creating value is not enough. If you write a song, or you build an app, or you cook a meal, you still have all your work ahead of you to find a customer/consumer, and understand what they find valuable enough to pay for, and ensure your offering matches that, and do the marketing/sales to get it in front of them, and convince them to pay, and scale to more people, and manage your books, and do all of this profitably. Expecting to be paid for simply creating value but doing none of the work to capture the value to me feels a little bit entitled. Or, at the very least, naive. What's interesting is that certain industries have more or less entitlement here, depending on the influence of "intellectual property" in that industry. For example, there's almost no concept of intellectual property in the cooking. If you invent a new recipe, you can't really patent it and tell everybody else that they're not allowed to make it. So, pretty much every chef is okay with the fact that they need to actually capture value by opening a restaurant or going to work for one. It's similar in the software industry, where rather than patenting all of our software and trying to enforce it, we generally do the opposite and release software in an open-source way. We're quite aware that if we want to profit, we'll need to start our own startup, and we have no qualms with that. But with writing, music, etc., you see a lot more creators who want to just do the creation part, who don't want to do the business part, but who then want the profits that the business part enables. I can empathize for sure, I get it. But I think a world with less rent-seeking behavior is better. A world where more people understand what it takes to capture value and are willing to do it (or happy to just not do it) is a better world. A world where more people feel entitled to the profits earned by those who are able to capture value, I think, is worse.
• 217 4mo ago
  That is actually not that bad of an idea huh
• agnosticmantis 4mo ago
  To paraphrase Margin Call, the pubic will soon be left holding the biggest bag of odorous Xcrement assembled in the history of IPOs. We will all own half, just not the good half.
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
• satvikpendem 4mo ago
  Once they IPO, the public will in fact own much of them.
  • 2ffaa 4mo ago
    [flagged]
• nodesocket 4mo ago
  The quickest way to lose the AI battle to China and reinstate censorship and model political bias is to hand the industry over to the government. This doesn’t just benefit democrats, whatever political party is in power will use them as tools of political means. Not to mention almost certainly pricing won’t act in accordance with free market forces but instead be regulated. See healthcare.
• mudil 4mo ago
  "Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice." - Thomas Sowell
  • triceratops 4mo ago
    "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's..."
    • Ancapistani 4mo ago
      That's one of my favorite verses, specifically because it leaves determining what is in fact Caesar's as an exercise for the reader.
  • morbicer 4mo ago
    If we are pulling quotes out of a hat, why not some OG one? “He who oppresses the poor taunts and insults his Maker, But he who is kind and merciful and gracious to the needy honors Him.” Proverbs 14:31
• sobellian 4mo ago
  Taking 50% of a few valuable companies for no compensation is just expropriation. Not that this has political legs, but even if it did, expect an enormous fight. The more obviously legal (and stupendously expensive) route would be eminent domain.
  • gettingoverit 4mo ago
    Shouldn't be a problem, as AI companies expropriated knowledge and jobs.
• theLiminator 4mo ago
  This would have a massive chilling effect on the private sector as a whole. IMO it would completely destroy investment in America. American companies and markets get extraordinary investor interest due to strong property rights. Once those rights are gone there will be massive capital flight and greatly reduced investment. Imo this proposal is even worse than a billionaire wealth tax (which has all sorts of implementation issues).
• josefritzishere 4mo ago
  The public should own 100% of AI companies. Why stop at 50%?
• w10-1 4mo ago
  This is more interesting than it looks, because it's using normal corporate control rather than regulation. Obviously the current stakeholders hate losing control and wealth, but that's not the biggest issue. Senator Sander's goal is not for some vast public to share the wealth, but for the government to have a veto on what gets done, to limit the collateral damage/exported costs. That's a classical government function. However, the record of regulatory capture is nearly perfect, so it's likely the reverse would be achieved: the government-sponsored providers being a required intermediary in all knowledge work, with a corresponding incentive to seize those reins. The probabilistic range of possibilities looks bleak: Now that all regulatory or quasi-governmental agencies of any import (Fed, FDA, EPA, Congress, Courts, CPB) have demonstrated remarkable plasticity to political whim, one would anticipate the worst would come of creating a political franchise out of fighting for control over AI; it would corrupt other aspects of politics.
• mindslight 4mo ago
  I'm sorry to say, but this is a losing position, as in one you only adopt when you've already lost and are trying to bargain. It presupposes that the AI companies are unregulateable, and that the only possible avenue of influence/dividend is through ownership. Contrast with the traditional idea that when companies create harm, the government works to stop that harm by default. Or that if these companies actually do succeed at rolling up up the distributed economy into a handful of centralized companies, the government steps in to tax their outsized gains to preserve some semblance of a distributed economy. Furthermore, what does said "ownership" actually do ? If the government is unable to regulate these companies, then it is also unable to reliably exercise a voting interest or insist on receiving dividends - if the companies are this powerful, then whoever actually controls them can always alter the terms and reject the "owners'" demands.
• jandrewrogers 4mo ago
  This would be for the benefit of the political elite, not “the public”.
• NDlurker 4mo ago
  Lately I've been thinking about digital co-ops. Imagine a member owned server farm for running private AI models and cloud services. It could be small, like a neighborhood or citywide project running on cobbled together used hardware like that post the other day where someone got an older server GPU running on his PC. Or it could be a small data center for small businesses and individual users to use. Members could have more privacy than giving all their data to companies like Google and they could have a say in what hardware is used and what type of energy generation is used to power it. There seem to have been more posts over the last couple years about running home media servers and getting away from subscription services; maybe something like that could be an alternative to what we have now.
  • supermdguy 4mo ago
    There was a show HN for something similar a couple months ago[0]. Looks like they shut it down. Probably too difficult/low-margin to run as a business, but I think the co-op model you mentioned has potential. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47639779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47639779
    • NDlurker 4mo ago
      I think a co-op would appeal to the same demographic who are into mesh networks plus all the anti-Flock people. Maybe I'll start something with my friend group and see how it goes from there.
• vincefutr23 4mo ago
  Between California and the federal government the public is already going to receive half the value of the equity in cash. The only question is will they buy back in ?
• triceratops 4mo ago
  I think, up until now, no politician has campaigned on the combination of a wealth tax and a significant income tax reduction. Wealth taxes are always proposed as in addition to, rather than a replacement for, income taxes. This makes them an electoral loser. All the temporarily embarrassed millionaires and billionaires come out to rally against the wealth tax. On the other hand if it put significant money into most people's hands...it's going to be a lot harder to fight.
• solatic 4mo ago
  The public should own more than half. Via the stock market. Where public shareholders can vote in elections to control the Board of Directors, and elect Directors that act in the fiduciary interests of shareholders, and return excess capital to shareholders by issuing dividends. Where any member of the public can decide to buy or sell shares, being the most important development in the democratization of wealth development in all of human history, second only to the index fund that let members of the public put wealth development on autopilot? When did public ownership mean that the government needed to be the owner? And when did we start to allow companies to float so few shares that public shareholder voting rights became largely meaningless?
  • triceratops 4mo ago
    The public doesn't have that much money.
    • BrenBarn 4mo ago
      The government could distribute its ownership stake to individuals.
      • triceratops 4mo ago
        That won't lead to corruption at all.
    • solatic 4mo ago
      Then perhaps the big AI companies aren't actually worth that much.
  • jdgoesmarching 4mo ago
    This comment really drives home the effective propaganda of “publicly owned” as a term. Concentrated ownership of the wealthy is not synonymous with “the public.” You are very literally arguing for plutocracy over democracy.
    • 4mo ago
• mikewarot 4mo ago
  I love it, this is exactly the kind of thing government is meant to do, bring externalities to profit under control. There is something that's been stolen from all of us, collectively, and certain authors and artists, specifically, the creative soul we all pour into our expression, here, there, and everywhere online. I yeeted my Reddit account as soon as I learned it was being used, without my consent, to train AI. I now have regrets, that I didn't delete all my comments there recursively first. However, because everything I posted there (and I posted quite a bit!) is part of the training data, it's interesting to know that every future AI is going to have a little bit of my resistance to authority, and lateral thinking, and just a bit of uppity in it, because of me. ;-) So, to yank part of the profits from our stolen soul back, via a TAX, seems quite reasonable to this Citizen of the United States. No money going out, just asserting authority, and collecting something on behalf of all of us, is a brilliant strategy for offsetting part of the theft they did first.
• didibus 4mo ago
  The thing about owning is that it messes up the incentives. If the government owns something, it will be tempting to intervene if it loses value. And when he government needs money, they often sell at stupid prices. I think taxing makes more sense.
  • triceratops 4mo ago
    > If the government owns something, it will be tempting to intervene if it loses value. Valid point. I'd propose that if the government owns anything it only gets non-voting shares. And it should never own a controlling share of anything. > And when he government needs money, they often sell at stupid prices. I'd apply some kind of indexing algorithm. Leaving it to individual managers is bound to lead to corruption.
  • mrdependable 4mo ago
    What about something like carbon credits? Every citizen gets awarded a yearly AI usage credit. If a company wants to use an LLM, they have to buy the usage from the public market. People can use their own credits freely.
• pbasista 4mo ago
  In general, it seems to me that an abstract resource like AI cannot possibly be regulated. Even if US forced their hand and took ownership of the controlling stakes in the current major AI companies, what stops the other AI companies from raising up and doing whatever they want? Perhaps the assumption is that these large AI companies need large datacenters to operate and that is how they will be regulated. But what about the datacenters outside the US jurisdiction? And what about local AI? In the old days, the computers were huge and there was one per city. Now, several decades later, we all have plenty of our own computers. I cannot imagine why the trend would not continue with AI. Over time, it is in my opinion plausible that most of our common needs would be satisfied by local AI running on one's home servers or even phones. How is that going to be regulated by owning a controlling stake in a few US AI companies? I do not see into the details of what Mr. Bernie Sanders is suggesting. It seems to me though that his idea of somehow regulating the AI needs further development. Because the currently discussed approaches seem to me like a hot take that has not been thought over very well.
• fourseventy 4mo ago
  Bernie is a full on communist at this point. Seizing the assets of private companies for the government? WTF.
  • pbasista 4mo ago
    > full on communist Please do not use the term communist lightly, i.e. as an umbrella term for people who express ideas that e.g. more government control or regulation is in some circumstances reasonable. The only forms of communism that have ever actually materialized in society have all been authoritarian regimes or outright dictatorships. Where the only "truth" is dictated by the governing leader or party. Where you cannot express your opinion freely. Where you cannot e.g. go to a university or have a slightly better job unless you are loyal to the party establishment. Where people are afraid to talk to their neighbors about politics because they cannot know who is going to report them for anti-government opinions. Where people are persecuted, imprisoned or even killed for their opinions. To the best of my knowledge, Bernie Sanders has never expressed such ideas. One might argue that here we are talking about the purely academic definition of communism. But unfortunately, in the real world, there is no such thing as academic communism. So far it has always come with the dictatorship and with people who abuse it. Always.
    • sobellian 4mo ago
      He's advocating for the government seizing ownership of the means of production without compensation. That sounds pretty communist to me.
      • gettingoverit 4mo ago
        Do you propose taxpayers to shoulder compensations to AI companies that robbed them of data and jobs? I guess not being absurd is communist now :)
        • sobellian 4mo ago
          I'm not proposing anything. I don't think it's the government's remit to be honest. But government seizing the means of production is literally the definition of communism.
• pokstad 4mo ago
  If the public wants to own half of the AI company, then they should invest enough to buy half of it. Taking private property away without compensation is stealing. What the government did with Intel where they got 10% in stock was a bit better because Intel got money.
  • LetsGetTechnicl 4mo ago
    I mean gen AI is based on theft, I don't really see that as a deterrent. I don't want the companies to exist, and having government ownership sounds like a convenient way to get bailed out when the bubble pops
    • pokstad 4mo ago
      That only is true if you agree with IP laws. China doesn’t, and you won’t be able to take 50% of the Chinese AI companies. American AI companies won’t be able to compete against Chinese ones if we take that stance.
      • lern_too_spel 4mo ago
        This is why public ownership makes sense. The public allows AI to get the data that it would otherwise need to steal in order to be globally competitive, and in return, the company that builds the AI allows the public to own it.
  • snake42 4mo ago
    Is income tax stealing?
  • opsnooperfax 4mo ago
    You basically described taxation. 25-75% of all your income is confiscated at the source and then you get… whatever it is that Washington does. I guess remit the money back as programs and direct payments or services so thousands of people can wet their beak in the process? In practice, we’re OK with theft. We just argue over who gets the loot and which segment of the population gets harmed.
• sershe 4mo ago
  Yeah because collective ownership worked out so well for everything from Soviet cars to Venezuelan oil. Anyone speaking for "the people" is either an evil scumbag or a useful idiot for future ones. "People" are composed of individuals. Most individuals' content is nearly worthless for AI training (and some like Sanders' are probably harmful, they should own negative shares in this scheme:D). Let individuals decide (including in the court of law like in those copyright lawsuits by those few that actually produce valuable content) how theirs is to be used. I trust Anthropic, heck even Musk, more than I would trust some apparatchik legally empowered to decide for the "people".
• VikingCoder 4mo ago
  The thought I've toyed with was forcing public companies in some industries to issue some percentage of stocks to the government... And then using incentives to get them to pay dividends.
• skmurphy 4mo ago
  "No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." Gideon J. Tucker
  • amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
    On the flip side, without state protection, no man's life liberty or property would be safe either.
    • skmurphy 4mo ago
      I agree: a "state of nature" leads to lives that are "nasty, brutish and short." How do we find legislators who are good stewards for the public trust and welfare. We subject public companies to transparency regulations, perhaps legislator would benefit from more transparency. I am not sure where to draw the line to prevent mob rule or other undesirable outcomes, but legislators manage enormous budgets. Arnold Kling looks at ways to reorganize to create tighter accountability in https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-unbalance-of-power https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-unbalance-of-power
    • akramachamarei 4mo ago
      That's not quite true either. State protection is neither necessary nor sufficient to consistently ensure safety for any particular person or their property. Obviously, there's a sweet spot.
      • amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
        Hmmm. Are there stateless areas with consistent safety? Maybe I missed something.
        • akramachamarei 4mo ago
          Um, not that I know of. There probably are some, but very small. Depends on what you mean by area. When I spoke of "not necessary or sufficient", I thought I was careful to quantify that expression over individuals; sharing your original framing "no man's […]". Certainly some people may possess sufficient skill and will and influence and have few enough enemies to be safe for life without a state. And certainly some people possess such great weakness and incompetence and antipathy and have enough enemies that no state could protect them. Maybe that's a nitpick on your phrasing but I am a licensed Picker of Nits (one who happens to be a minarchist, not an anarchist, for what it's worth.)
• Blackstrat 4mo ago
  Under no conditions should the government own AI companies. The government has its hands in too many companies already. What needs to happen is stricter enforcement of copyright laws and intellectual property rights. In other words, AI training data should be curtailed substantially until such time as the companies are willing to pay for it. It's no different than the various other internet piracy issues, e.g., movies and music. Just more hype at the moment. That too will pass.
• arjie 4mo ago
  If I'm being entirely honest, I actually do not think that Donald Trump being de-facto CEO of OpenAI and Anthropic is a great idea. In fact, I do not think that Joe Biden being that is a great idea, but I definitely think we would have ruined this technology if we had Trump in charge of it. It's much better this way, where he expresses some power in his role as the government's chief executive and the founders of the AI companies comply in the way they do or resist in the way they do. In addition, what would the public do with AI companies? They think that AI inference sucks up oceans of water. The same thing would happen here as happened to nuclear reactors after the NRC was made - it would take half a century before the first reactor approved after the NRC was set up to start up.
• akramachamarei 4mo ago
  Hackers should think of slavery reparations when they think of Sanders' proposal. Not as an equivalent, but as a more credible and similarly untenable idea. Sanders' being to take from those who produce to give to those who likely had almost no hand in the production, and with certainly no attempt to discern what contribution that may have been.
  • dwaltrip 4mo ago
    The Alaskan sovereign wealth fund is a much better metaphor.
    • akramachamarei 4mo ago
      I see the comparison--like AI companies are mining value out of public corpora, somewhat like how an oil or mining company extracts resources from the earth. An important difference being that when minerals are extracted they are removed from common use, unlike when a model is trained, which does not subtract from the commons (at least not directly, or substantially?)
• chasd00 4mo ago
  Instead of "The Public.." read it as "The Government Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies" because that's what it really means. It doesn't sound all that great now does it? Imagine what a red/blue administration would do with complete control of those AI capabilities.
• tracker1 4mo ago
  The fact that AI is largely trained on unlicensed IP from the people is probably the single most coherent argument in favor of govt forced socialism on private entities I've probably ever considered. Not that I agree with all of the statements, assertions or point in TFA. I say this as a conservative leaning libertarian even.
• yowo 4mo ago
  Better idea, mandate 4 days work week and 30 days PTO, the labor squeeze such law would cause will bring wages up and offsets AI productivity boost impact and pays people back in lifetime.
  • orangecoffee 4mo ago
    This could have a shot if we also recommend to companies that, they should convert overall pay to ~2/3 for employees, and with the 1/3 extra hire more people. so every company that opts in has no higher people budget, but generates more employment. This only requires that everyone take a pay cut to help their peer citizens. I would sign up for this. But would the majority - would you? yes/no - and why?
• rho138 4mo ago
  Aaron Swartz died for nothing.
  • bicepjai 4mo ago
    This was the first tragedy that came to my mind
• effnorwood 4mo ago
  Grab Sears and JC Penney while you're in there.
• mvdtnz 4mo ago
  And by "the public" he means "the American public".
• Garshtrot 4mo ago
  Fortunately this rslurration is further whining by people who can not. It's fun reading their impotent anger but, that's all it is.
• Garlef 4mo ago
  Maybe the public should own half of everything.
• keeda 4mo ago
  I'm sympathetic to the argument that AI is built without recompense on the work of all humanity, but anyone else think that's a lot of words to say "government backstop"? ;-) Personally, I'm very bullish on AI but it's not so clear that the frontier labs have (so far) a business model that justifies their valuations. Having the government own a substantial stake in them sounds like it could set up some very perverse incentives. Furthermore a significant ownership stake also comes with a degree of control, and we do not want any government to have that much control over what is going to be THE biggest influence vector in the history of humanity.
• stevenalowe 4mo ago
  Cool cool can we own half of all of the other industries that benefit from the commons? Oil, gas, gold,…?
  • defrost 4mo ago
    If you don't already, you should have a stake in your countries natural resources, such as Norway's stake in their oil.
    • stevenalowe 4mo ago
      That would be great but apparently it doesn’t work like that here (except Alaska)
• zajio1am 4mo ago
  50% property tax is just seizure without compensation, which is generally considered human rights violation. If government wants 50% of shares, it can just buy it (or expropriate it with compensation) and use its ability to get cheap long-term loans to finance it.