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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 fun

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.
    - chrischen 4mo ago
      This is the same argument people were making about how stealing music was the same as stealing a physical product.
  - Larrikin 4mo ago
    AI companies took public, private, and copyrighted data. Your position is that because these big companies stole so much we should let them get away with it by devaluing it further so everyone can ignore intellectual property law.
    - chrischen 4mo ago
      They already "stole" it. They aren't giving it back and they've established their valuations based off of that. If they start paying now, it's simply going to be impossible for any more upstarts to do this or even release open-weight models because everyone with data will become rent seekers. Imagine if they started off with rent-seekers, we'd simply not have the benefit of these models at all at this point.
  - foobarchu 4mo ago
    > 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 Well no, you're also paying them for having done the work to "acquire" that data. That acquisition arguably amounts to the greatest theft in history.
    - chrischen 4mo ago
      If I understand the correctly the initial models were done by scraping the internet off public data. They now probably pay for access, especially to companies that hold the data. Even in the latter case, the content creators probably don't see anything because they signed away their rights using whatever free service they uploaded their work / comment to. In hacker news' case I'm sure some bot is scraping my prose right now and training something with it, which I'm totally fine with because the act of trying to rent seek my 0.00001 cent of value in this post is not worth the detriment to AI advancement.
- rayiner 4mo ago
  “Took?” AI companies aren’t removing the information from the public domain. What happened to “information wants to be free?”
  - antonyt 4mo ago
    Individuals have faced federal charges and served prison time for reselling copyrighted content. I don't see the same happening to AI execs.
  - reasonableklout 4mo ago
    I interpreted it to mean people feel as though they didn’t consent to having their information trained on, because for many folks, they published articles, open source projects, etc. assuming that they were only helping other people. It’s quite a shock to see megacorps use such data to create machines which threaten the livelihoods of the original authors themselves. Also, much of the data used to train LLMs are not strictly public domain. For example, copyrighted books and source code with attribution-requiring licenses feature heavily in many corpuses. There are still pending lawsuits against the labs here, yet they continue to push forward. It’s no surprise that there is popular demand for redistribution.
  - TehCorwiz 4mo ago
    Yes. Took. As in: without permission. Didn't ask before hand, didn't provide a way to opt-out (although that would also be problematic), didn't ask for volunteers. Took.
    - ai_critic 4mo ago
      The word you're looking for is "copied". Don't fall for the great lie of intellectual "property".
      - TehCorwiz 4mo ago
        If I can go to jail over it then they should too. Let's not judge them by some imaginary ideal world while judging individuals by the present crushing reality.
- speak_plainly 4mo ago
  [dead]
- onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
  So if they only use public domain data, and data from the Chinese and Europeans, do you still feel entitled to their valuations? Because I hate to break it to you, they could have zero drop in quality by just not incorporating US data... If we're talking about copyright, why are we somehow entitled to profits derived from stealing Taylor Swift's IP? Why do you get a cut of AI derivatives and not get half of her wealth, too, directly? Microsoft has trained models entirely on synthetic and public data with SotA results.
  - foobarchu 4mo ago
    > Because I hate to break it to you, they could have zero drop in quality by just not incorporating US data... This is so false and unsupportable it's comical. The same goes the other way, if you claim they would use no value by only incorporating American data.
baliex 4mo ago
From the article: > Let us be clear. Artificial intelligence was not created out of thin air. The data and language used by generative A.I. tools didn’t just pop into Sam Altman’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
  And the ones spanning generations were completely fair game. The ones that were still under copyright are a different matter. (It has not, so far as I know, been legally decided, but it's probably going to depend on whether AI is a transformative use.)
  - macintux 4mo ago
    > The ones that were still under copyright are a different matter. Given the sheer volume of information posted to the Internet in the last 40-50 years, I'd wager that covers 80% or more of the relevant input data. Old text is relatively scarce in the grand scheme of things. But I have no real clue, just spitballing.
  - pessimizer 4mo ago
    > And the ones spanning generations were completely fair game. No they weren't. Copyright at this point covers things for at least half a dozen generations back, and is intentionally made annoying enough that it is difficult to find out what is covered and what isn't. LLM companies didn't bother with any of that (they just pirated like your average online 13 year old), meanwhile archive.org got sued for pulling the music off ancient wax cylinders. Clean up and dramatically shorten, restrict, or even eliminate copyright, and we can start talking about what's fair game or not. People were afraid to sing "Happy Birthday" in movies for probably 80 years, and the corporations that own all IP made it very clear at the time that they preferred for the status of "Happy Birthday" to remain unclear, and would send you a scary letter if you used it. > probably going to depend on whether AI is a transformative use. It's probably going to be entirely political, and decided through corruption. It's obviously a mechanical transformation. If rap DJ's got sued for cramming songs full of 80 extremely manipulated samples that you'd need a forensics expert to trace, and all sampled music had to revert to a form where they'd license a single song and re-release it with somebody rapping over it, LLMs are a violation. DJ's were doing an absolutely creative translation, and LLMs are not creative, they are Δ-following pinball machines.
npodbielski 4mo ago
They know it will tank and want you money to save their friends.
fny 4mo ago
They do this in Alaska's fund with great success[0] and Alaska is a deep red state. It's primarily funded by oil and gas revenue and other mineral royalties. Also thats only (at least) 25% of total revenue, the other 75% the state spends directly. Norway's oil fund is another famous example mentioned in the article.[1] [0]: https://apfc.org/ https://apfc.org/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
- Aunche 4mo ago
  The oil is on Alaska/Norway's land, so they can choose what they want to do with money from selling that oil including distributing it or purchasing assets. Sanders seem to be proposing to arbitrarily seize half of the companies.
  - exe34 4mo ago
    They seized all of humanity's intellectual output first.
    - Garshtrot 4mo ago
      Where'd they put it? All my books are still on their shelves.
      - exe34 4mo ago
        Is that why digital piracy is illegal?
  - petesergeant 4mo ago
    The oil companies are exploiting a public asset, so it's obvious the public would benefit. Who are the AI companies paying for the training data they're using?
  - vrganj 4mo ago
    > The oil is on Alaska/Norway's land These AI companies are on American land.
_alternator_ 4mo ago
The focus on AI is just to capture some of the current zeitgeist. Socialists generally think that most large businesses be run for the public benefit in some form or another. This is basically making that point with AI companies as their true influence is rapidly increasing. The rhetorical strategy here is to hook socialist ideas onto something people are already thinking about, a land-and-expand rhetorical strategy. Personally I'm against the proposal, but the details are not the point because it's not going happen in this form. It's about changing minds first, then changing policy down the road.
nailer 4mo ago
> 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. Taking ownership of these companies is a Bernie thing not a Trump thing, but a sovereign wealth fund is used to pay off national debt.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
  You can't "pay off debt" with a "wealth fund". You won't have any "wealth" if you use it. That's just taxing and spending...
  - nailer 4mo ago
    Depends how much of the wealth you use but yes you're right - Norway and Singapore offset debt with the fund rather than pay it back.
closeparen 4mo ago
You get Social Security and Medicare. Which are cheaper now than they will ever be, as the population is only getting older.
geodel 4mo ago
Because unlike AI companies Apple, Walmart, Exxon are not taking away all human generated knowledge and dumping in their data centers?
triceratops 4mo ago
> Government spending is already ~40% of GDP. > 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. Use the sovereign wealth fund to reduce income taxes. Other countries manage to run wealth funds without corruption. If a country can't do it then, I hate to break it to you, it's definitely not the fund's fault. > Why half of AI and not half of Walmart & Exxon & Apple? Good question. The answer: a more broad-based wealth tax, in the form of assets which go into a sovereign wealth fund, is probably the only way to make the long-term pension math work out in developed countries. You can only tax labor so much when capital actually has the most growth.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
p2detar 4mo ago
And given that the training data is very much international, why would this be just a USA-sovereign fund and not a world-fund?
SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
The linked post explains in detail why. Sanders thinks that AI will be "the most transformational technology in the history of the world", radically changing everything about our lives, and thus control of AI will shape the future of humanity in a way that control of Walmart or Exxon or Apple does not. Perhaps you don't agree with him, although I would note that it's pretty rare for Bernie Sanders to agree with billionaires about how important something they've invented is! But if you don't take people seriously when they say they think AI is the most important thing that's happened in our lifetime, you're going to be endlessly confused when they act according to that belief.
rickydroll 4mo ago
> Why half of AI and not half of Walmart & Exxon & Apple? I think the 50% number is a stake in the ground, period. A starting point for the discussion. Why not Walmart? That's a great idea. Many companies, including Walmart, pay their employees so little that they qualify for Medicaid and other social benefits even though they're working full-time. One of the primary methods of building wealth in this country is through stock ownership. Instead of being a wage slave, only making money based on your labor, with a stock tax on a company, the growth of that company's stock benefits everyone in the country directly, rather than just the moneyed few. > 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. That is a risk with an administration like the current one, but if the sovereign fund was ethically managed by an independent department, that wouldn't be an issue. The rest of the world has sovereign wealth funds, and you can find some good examples of how to do it right. > What benefit does that have for anyone else? How do you benefit with a 401k owning stock? What works for one should work for the other. > 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. How does any sovereign wealth fund increase its value? Proper planning, spending only dividends and not principal. Also, the sovereign wealth fund would continue to acquire stock whenever any company issues new stock. The fund would get 50% of those shares. If one were to make it an active fund, the government has enough insider knowledge to know when to buy, sell, and short stocks. What? Using insider knowledge is unfair, you say? Why shouldn't the government play by the same rules as the rest of the finance industry? It's only us retail investors that have less-than-optimal returns because of insufficient knowledge.
therealpygon 4mo ago
Did those other companies literally steal the collective works of most citizens to do business? No? Then that’s probably why not, don’t you think?
culi 4mo ago
Gov't spending is 38% and that's totally normal, if a bit low. France is at 57%, the UK at 44%, and Japan at 39%
AlwaysRock 4mo ago
LLMs have been trained on the collective output of the global population. That is why.

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.
  - chrischen 4mo ago
    This is the same argument people were making about how stealing music was the same as stealing a physical product.
- Larrikin 4mo ago
  AI companies took public, private, and copyrighted data. Your position is that because these big companies stole so much we should let them get away with it by devaluing it further so everyone can ignore intellectual property law.
  - chrischen 4mo ago
    They already "stole" it. They aren't giving it back and they've established their valuations based off of that. If they start paying now, it's simply going to be impossible for any more upstarts to do this or even release open-weight models because everyone with data will become rent seekers. Imagine if they started off with rent-seekers, we'd simply not have the benefit of these models at all at this point.
- foobarchu 4mo ago
  > 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 Well no, you're also paying them for having done the work to "acquire" that data. That acquisition arguably amounts to the greatest theft in history.
  - chrischen 4mo ago
    If I understand the correctly the initial models were done by scraping the internet off public data. They now probably pay for access, especially to companies that hold the data. Even in the latter case, the content creators probably don't see anything because they signed away their rights using whatever free service they uploaded their work / comment to. In hacker news' case I'm sure some bot is scraping my prose right now and training something with it, which I'm totally fine with because the act of trying to rent seek my 0.00001 cent of value in this post is not worth the detriment to AI advancement.
rayiner 4mo ago
“Took?” AI companies aren’t removing the information from the public domain. What happened to “information wants to be free?”
- antonyt 4mo ago
  Individuals have faced federal charges and served prison time for reselling copyrighted content. I don't see the same happening to AI execs.
- reasonableklout 4mo ago
  I interpreted it to mean people feel as though they didn’t consent to having their information trained on, because for many folks, they published articles, open source projects, etc. assuming that they were only helping other people. It’s quite a shock to see megacorps use such data to create machines which threaten the livelihoods of the original authors themselves. Also, much of the data used to train LLMs are not strictly public domain. For example, copyrighted books and source code with attribution-requiring licenses feature heavily in many corpuses. There are still pending lawsuits against the labs here, yet they continue to push forward. It’s no surprise that there is popular demand for redistribution.
- TehCorwiz 4mo ago
  Yes. Took. As in: without permission. Didn't ask before hand, didn't provide a way to opt-out (although that would also be problematic), didn't ask for volunteers. Took.
  - ai_critic 4mo ago
    The word you're looking for is "copied". Don't fall for the great lie of intellectual "property".
    - TehCorwiz 4mo ago
      If I can go to jail over it then they should too. Let's not judge them by some imaginary ideal world while judging individuals by the present crushing reality.
speak_plainly 4mo ago
[dead]
onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
So if they only use public domain data, and data from the Chinese and Europeans, do you still feel entitled to their valuations? Because I hate to break it to you, they could have zero drop in quality by just not incorporating US data... If we're talking about copyright, why are we somehow entitled to profits derived from stealing Taylor Swift's IP? Why do you get a cut of AI derivatives and not get half of her wealth, too, directly? Microsoft has trained models entirely on synthetic and public data with SotA results.
- foobarchu 4mo ago
  > Because I hate to break it to you, they could have zero drop in quality by just not incorporating US data... This is so false and unsupportable it's comical. The same goes the other way, if you claim they would use no value by only incorporating American data.

baliex 4mo ago

From the article: > Let us be clear. Artificial intelligence was not created out of thin air. The data and language used by generative A.I. tools didn’t just pop into Sam Altman’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations.

AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
And the ones spanning generations were completely fair game. The ones that were still under copyright are a different matter. (It has not, so far as I know, been legally decided, but it's probably going to depend on whether AI is a transformative use.)
- macintux 4mo ago
  > The ones that were still under copyright are a different matter. Given the sheer volume of information posted to the Internet in the last 40-50 years, I'd wager that covers 80% or more of the relevant input data. Old text is relatively scarce in the grand scheme of things. But I have no real clue, just spitballing.
- pessimizer 4mo ago
  > And the ones spanning generations were completely fair game. No they weren't. Copyright at this point covers things for at least half a dozen generations back, and is intentionally made annoying enough that it is difficult to find out what is covered and what isn't. LLM companies didn't bother with any of that (they just pirated like your average online 13 year old), meanwhile archive.org got sued for pulling the music off ancient wax cylinders. Clean up and dramatically shorten, restrict, or even eliminate copyright, and we can start talking about what's fair game or not. People were afraid to sing "Happy Birthday" in movies for probably 80 years, and the corporations that own all IP made it very clear at the time that they preferred for the status of "Happy Birthday" to remain unclear, and would send you a scary letter if you used it. > probably going to depend on whether AI is a transformative use. It's probably going to be entirely political, and decided through corruption. It's obviously a mechanical transformation. If rap DJ's got sued for cramming songs full of 80 extremely manipulated samples that you'd need a forensics expert to trace, and all sampled music had to revert to a form where they'd license a single song and re-release it with somebody rapping over it, LLMs are a violation. DJ's were doing an absolutely creative translation, and LLMs are not creative, they are Δ-following pinball machines.

npodbielski 4mo ago

They know it will tank and want you money to save their friends.

fny 4mo ago

They do this in Alaska's fund with great success[0] and Alaska is a deep red state. It's primarily funded by oil and gas revenue and other mineral royalties. Also thats only (at least) 25% of total revenue, the other 75% the state spends directly. Norway's oil fund is another famous example mentioned in the article.[1] [0]: https://apfc.org/ https://apfc.org/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

Aunche 4mo ago
The oil is on Alaska/Norway's land, so they can choose what they want to do with money from selling that oil including distributing it or purchasing assets. Sanders seem to be proposing to arbitrarily seize half of the companies.
- exe34 4mo ago
  They seized all of humanity's intellectual output first.
  - Garshtrot 4mo ago
    Where'd they put it? All my books are still on their shelves.
    - exe34 4mo ago
      Is that why digital piracy is illegal?
- petesergeant 4mo ago
  The oil companies are exploiting a public asset, so it's obvious the public would benefit. Who are the AI companies paying for the training data they're using?
- vrganj 4mo ago
  > The oil is on Alaska/Norway's land These AI companies are on American land.

_alternator_ 4mo ago

The focus on AI is just to capture some of the current zeitgeist. Socialists generally think that most large businesses be run for the public benefit in some form or another. This is basically making that point with AI companies as their true influence is rapidly increasing. The rhetorical strategy here is to hook socialist ideas onto something people are already thinking about, a land-and-expand rhetorical strategy. Personally I'm against the proposal, but the details are not the point because it's not going happen in this form. It's about changing minds first, then changing policy down the road.

nailer 4mo ago

> 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. Taking ownership of these companies is a Bernie thing not a Trump thing, but a sovereign wealth fund is used to pay off national debt.

onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
You can't "pay off debt" with a "wealth fund". You won't have any "wealth" if you use it. That's just taxing and spending...
- nailer 4mo ago
  Depends how much of the wealth you use but yes you're right - Norway and Singapore offset debt with the fund rather than pay it back.

closeparen 4mo ago

You get Social Security and Medicare. Which are cheaper now than they will ever be, as the population is only getting older.

geodel 4mo ago

Because unlike AI companies Apple, Walmart, Exxon are not taking away all human generated knowledge and dumping in their data centers?

triceratops 4mo ago

> Government spending is already ~40% of GDP. > 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. Use the sovereign wealth fund to reduce income taxes. Other countries manage to run wealth funds without corruption. If a country can't do it then, I hate to break it to you, it's definitely not the fund's fault. > Why half of AI and not half of Walmart & Exxon & Apple? Good question. The answer: a more broad-based wealth tax, in the form of assets which go into a sovereign wealth fund, is probably the only way to make the long-term pension math work out in developed countries. You can only tax labor so much when capital actually has the most growth.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

p2detar 4mo ago

And given that the training data is very much international, why would this be just a USA-sovereign fund and not a world-fund?

SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago

The linked post explains in detail why. Sanders thinks that AI will be "the most transformational technology in the history of the world", radically changing everything about our lives, and thus control of AI will shape the future of humanity in a way that control of Walmart or Exxon or Apple does not. Perhaps you don't agree with him, although I would note that it's pretty rare for Bernie Sanders to agree with billionaires about how important something they've invented is! But if you don't take people seriously when they say they think AI is the most important thing that's happened in our lifetime, you're going to be endlessly confused when they act according to that belief.

rickydroll 4mo ago

> Why half of AI and not half of Walmart & Exxon & Apple? I think the 50% number is a stake in the ground, period. A starting point for the discussion. Why not Walmart? That's a great idea. Many companies, including Walmart, pay their employees so little that they qualify for Medicaid and other social benefits even though they're working full-time. One of the primary methods of building wealth in this country is through stock ownership. Instead of being a wage slave, only making money based on your labor, with a stock tax on a company, the growth of that company's stock benefits everyone in the country directly, rather than just the moneyed few. > 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. That is a risk with an administration like the current one, but if the sovereign fund was ethically managed by an independent department, that wouldn't be an issue. The rest of the world has sovereign wealth funds, and you can find some good examples of how to do it right. > What benefit does that have for anyone else? How do you benefit with a 401k owning stock? What works for one should work for the other. > 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. How does any sovereign wealth fund increase its value? Proper planning, spending only dividends and not principal. Also, the sovereign wealth fund would continue to acquire stock whenever any company issues new stock. The fund would get 50% of those shares. If one were to make it an active fund, the government has enough insider knowledge to know when to buy, sell, and short stocks. What? Using insider knowledge is unfair, you say? Why shouldn't the government play by the same rules as the rest of the finance industry? It's only us retail investors that have less-than-optimal returns because of insufficient knowledge.

therealpygon 4mo ago

Did those other companies literally steal the collective works of most citizens to do business? No? Then that’s probably why not, don’t you think?

culi 4mo ago

Gov't spending is 38% and that's totally normal, if a bit low. France is at 57%, the UK at 44%, and Japan at 39%

AlwaysRock 4mo ago

LLMs have been trained on the collective output of the global population. That is why.