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OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’
- nok22kon 4mo agosoft nationalization
- bityard 4mo agoDoes OpenAI not have mandatory compliance training which forbids them from giving any government a bribe as a condition of doing business?
- micromacrofoot 4mo agothats for employees so they don't profit from government deals
- bityard 4mo agoYou're saying it's not bribery if the CEO does it?
- ModernMech 4mo agoNo they’re saying the CEO isn’t barred from bribery.
- 0123456789ABCDE 4mo agobribery is illegal; this is not
- stetrain 4mo agoHave any CEOs been held criminally liable for bribing government officials lately?
- micromacrofoot 4mo agoyes, this is how the system is designed employees are not given the power to legally take bribes, but the people running the company can (and it's not called a bribe, it's called business)
- frumiousirc 4mo agoI'd settle for Altman and his ilk paying a proper progressive income tax.
- rasz 4mo agoThis is how they will secure eventual bailout.
- radiator 4mo agoBut what would happen if no bailout came? I did not keep count of how many trillion USD they owe, but if we let OpenAI fail, what would be the consequences for ordinary people?
- eiejee 4mo agoNothing If OAI blew up now a whole lotta of people who supplied money would be angry. But those people are generally not the common person But the pushback will be — ‘but china!’
- khurs 4mo agoThe people who supplied money are not retail investors. They are rich people who have power and influence and connections to politicians, media etc
- amunozo 4mo agoSure because never ever in history losses of rich people and companies have been socialized and have been assumed by those "risk takers".
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- Mistletoe 4mo agoMy Mom wouldn’t be able to make AI images of her dog Chico as a pirate anymore.
- torben-friis 4mo agoIsn't this mostly circular? Let pichai, nadella and friends hold the bag. We'll be fine.
- osiris970 4mo agoIsn't this what people wanted? The public to have access to the gains of these companies? I don't want public ownership of any private companies but this seems to be what slopulism leads us to
- gcr 4mo agoum, no? “The government” owning a stake in OpenAI is different from “the people” owning a stake. How are you reading that differently?
- CuriouslyC 4mo agoThis is a trick to lock in "too big to fail" status and have leverage to lobby the government to ban "dangerous" Chinese models that are "robbing the taxpayer". 100% Trojan horse.
- A_D_E_P_T 4mo ago100%. I'd add: Whoever hasn't downloaded GLM 5.2 should download GLM 5.2 immediately.
- Grombobulous 4mo agoThe voter base who hates big government and communism is getting USSR-style state owned industry from its beloved leaders. This would be hilarious if it didn’t negatively impact all the sane people who aren’t in the cult.
- JKCalhoun 4mo agoWait, how does the public benefit from the gains of Open AI with this scheme?
- Traster 4mo agoInteresting. But if Sam really believes that the US public should share in the benefits of AI surely the number should be 50% not 5%.
- oliver-rock 4mo agoWhy 50% and not 100%? The obvious answer is it creates strange incentives. Maybe something like 5% across the board for all large tech companies make sense?
- ralferoo 4mo agoOr instead, they could just continue the simple route of taxing companies via corporation tax and dividend tax without having to worry about ownership at all.
- logicalappeals 4mo agoAgreed. 5% seems like enough to throw a dog a bone, but not have enough skin in the game
- cucumber3732842 4mo agoWhat's your basis for conflating government ownership with public benefit? Seems to me like it creates a lot of perverse incentives.
- reverius42 4mo agoI agree, I think we should go back to the old system of letting them be fully private and just taxing their gains heavily to pay for the public debts/needs.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- exabrial 4mo agoTaxes are theft. This is absurd. There’s zero reason to bail these ding dongs out. Their entire business proposition has been to keep warm by incinerating fresh cash.
- khalic 4mo ago> Taxes are theft lol what a weird way to start this post
- gordonhart 4mo agoObjectively it’s absurd to have an organization take a significant portion of your money on threat of imprisonment just to invest it in a corporation
- oblio 4mo agoYes, if we only look at absolute morals and first-order effects, yes. But if we think more deeply about this from the lens of human society, we ultimately end up with something like taxes. So we might as well just have taxes.
- cmrdporcupine 4mo agoThe state / government is the only reason they're able to have money and profits in the first place. There literally was no state (in its modern sense) until private property and the capitalist market. Feudalism or the Roman empire had an entirely different structure. The development of the modern state happened in concert with the development of classical liberal ideology, acts of enclosure, private property, and the capitalist market system. Capitalism needs the state, taxes, police, and the military to coordinate competing interests, maintain property laws and social order, and to ensure its own stability generally. ... Now, what Trump and Bessent and Lutnick are busy engineering is a bit beyond that -- rentier / parasitical capitalism in which the state acts more like a committee of oligarchs taking a cut for themselves than a "neutral" cabinet of technocrats seeking market stability.
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- throwaw12 4mo agoJust a reminder: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/13lgbir/sam_altman_on_capitol_hill_he_said_he_owns_no/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/13lgbir/sam_altman...
- petcat 4mo ago> Altman has also reportedly spoken with the Democratic senator Bernie Sanders in recent weeks. The senator has been pushing for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund overseen by an independent commission and financed through a one-time 50% tax on the stock of the biggest AI companies. Bernie shooting for the moon here
- rickydroll 4mo agoThe difference is that we can get to the moon
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- ProllyInfamous 4mo agoI know OpenAI has delayed their IPO by a year (i.e. not publicly traded, yet; so: no dividends), but wouldn't it be better for the Government/bottom 95% if instead of taking ownership, they taxed all tech-related stocks 5% every time they're traded – this is a perpetual stream of income, and would likely reduce speculative short-term trading... source: middle-aged electrician, owns a little stock (and would happily pay trading taxes, either in/out/both); know nothing unrelated to copper; eats crayons
- glimshe 4mo agoThat's a terrifying idea that would destroy the tech stock market as we know it. We already have incentives in capital gain taxes to encourage longer term ownership. Feel free to send a 5% donation to the government in your taxes every time you trade your tech stocks.
- ProllyInfamous 4mo agoThis is an order of magnitude less than Bernie's 50% per-tech-trade tax (obviously impossible & bad), which he suggested as a means to fund the inevitable UBI [turns out former presidentical candiate Michael Yang wasn't wrong, just early, with his 2020 prediction]. Having never sold any stock on a short-term basis (i.e. I am a long-term value investor), I also disagree on the abysmally low tax rates I pay for long-term selling. To paraphrase the great Warren Buffet: the ultrarich should be taxed more and its unfair that the taxcodes don't require it. ---- Having spent the majority of my working life as a bluecollar electrician, I can assure that my wagie tax burden (as percentage of income) is much higher than most fellow employed-by-tech readers, here.
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo agoIt's not about the aggregate tax burden. You're a long-term value investor because you live in a country where stock trading is an easy and low-friction thing the average person can do. A 5% transaction tax isn't really compatible with that; we would end up regressing to the global norm, where stocks are an esoteric hobby for rich people and the normal way to save for retirement is a savings account or cash piles under your mattress.
- dhoe 4mo agoBut governments cannot be trusted, better give it to an independent entity like they did with the Qatari jet
- bilekas 4mo agoThis feels a bit off.. How is the government supposed to be able to regulate them impartially when they're literally invested in them. What if a competitive startup startup starts to really take away from OpenAi's profits and then all of a sudden requires some approval for merger with Anthropic for example, I don't know if I would trust the government to be fair in their decision here. Leaving aside the potential for letting the government(tax payers) hold the bag if there is a collapse.
- simiones 4mo ago> How is the government supposed to be able to regulate them impartially when they're literally invested in them. That is exactly the point of this move, especially during the Trump administration.
- larsnystrom 4mo agoI assume that’s why Altman wants the government as a co-owner.
- amelius 4mo agoEverything seems rotten with this administration.
- chrisjj 4mo agoWhich of these two administrations? :)
- chinathrow 4mo agoAnd sama.
- potsandpans 4mo agoI'll take Sam over amodei. It's a both are bad choice.
- Sol- 4mo agoSeems to be a very bad mechanism to ensure democratic control of the technology. There must be better ways, even naively assuming that OpenAI is somehow genuine about wanting to broadly share its stake in the future.
- chrisjj 4mo ago> Seems to be a very bad mechanism to ensure democratic control of the technology. Think of it from the company's POV. As a very good mechanism to impede democratic control of the technology.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- red-iron-pine 4mo agowhat about the behavior of the US government currently has you thinking it would be democratic?
- oliver-rock 4mo agoThis is 9 years old. Shows that Sam Altman has been thinking about this for a while https://blog.samaltman.com/american-equity https://blog.samaltman.com/american-equity
- ragebol 4mo agoDiscussed also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15789108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15789108.
- ragebol 4mo agoBesides direct control, what could a dividend on the profits do what a well-proportioned corporate tax on profits cannot do? The state would only get dividends assuming it would not sell shares. And the state can exert control much more fairly (ie. to all competitors as well) with regulation and laws. Regulations and taxes are seen as 'un-american' I suppose, while giving stock to the government is not somehow?
- ethbr1 4mo agoThat's exactly the end run here. Taxes depend on laws (however imperfect and full of loopholes) that are equally applied across all corporations. Government equity/profit stakes are exactly the opposite: negotiated per corporation and cede power to the corporation. If Altman was honest about his question framing, the simplest answer would be "Tax AI companies more heavily and use the proceeds to fund universal social benefits / payments." In contrast, a one-off 5% equity stake is a bribe and nothing else.
- sbayg 4mo agoWhy assume it wouldn’t sell shares? If the state can take 5% ownership, it can sell that 5% for profit, and come back for another 5% next year. Ideally the rules on when to sell would be systematic, or made by a neutral bipartisan committee of advisors, but I suspect maybe it would be just be up to the treasury (like the crypto it now holds).
- granzymes 4mo ago>The proposal would also involve other US AI companies giving a similar stake to the government, the FT reported, although it is not clear yet whether companies such as Anthropic, Google and Meta would agree to the plan. I can't see Google or Meta shareholders agreeing to this? That said, Google, Meta, and SpaceX are all still founder-controlled using supervoting shares.
- nok22kon 4mo agothe choice is progressively giving more of the company to the government, or the government taking it by force it was long predicted that it is inevitable for national governments to fully nationalize AI labs and put them under military control
- JKCalhoun 4mo agoWe have had for decades any number of defense contractors in the U.S. not taken by force by the U.S. They seem to have, nonetheless, happily produced what the military was wanting to purchase. I'm not sure what's different here.
- ethbr1 4mo agoThe difference is that military procurement (a) isn't sold to the general public (try buying a machine gun) and (b) doesn't provide an opportunity to surveil and control the population (no citizens are also using F-35s to search how much Trump has made from crypto ventures). AI is and does.
- nok22kon 4mo agono US defense contractor can threaten the US government which is why no US defense contractor is given unsupervised access to nukes, even when maintaining them
- potsandpans 4mo agoAs far as I'm aware, this was only predicted by play acting effective altruists who tend to have a histrionic outlook around further developments of large language models.
- bitmasher9 4mo agoIn a proper capitalist society the government defines the rules of the market, aligned with the interests of several parties, and then companies compete within that well regulated and fair environment. The only incentive the government should have is to grow the entire market, so that they can collect more tax. There might be minor exceptions to protect key industries like food production or defense, but these should be a small as possible to ensure healthy competition. It’s something entirely different when the government starts taking a stake in individual companies instead of the market as a whole. This can easily bias the government to pick OpenAI for certain contracts, or enact laws that benefit OpenAI more than its competitors. It reduces competition which hurts the overall economy, and it is an obvious vector for corruption which hurts the efficiency of the government. It’s great if we can leverage AI to design the next great government system. A 5% stake feels more like a bribe to help push through some of these datacenter projects and enact friendly laws.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo agoThis is a vision of 'proper' but certainly not the only one. Another version many of the very rich would like to see is given below. In a proper capitalist society the capitalists define the rules of the market by competing to own the most politicians. The capitalists best at buying political influence get a larger say in what the rules will be so as to align them with their specific interests regardless of damage to others. When rules are aligned to your specific interests, this is called a well regulated and fair environment. Otherwise it is called a repressive nanny-state deep state swamp. The only incentive the government should have is to grow the politicians' personal wealth by bargaining with capitalists for which policies get enacted. There are no exceptions to protect key industries like food production. Defense spending is, however, in most capitalists interests as they often need the use of violent force to eliminate or subsume competition in other nations. Defense will therefore always receive robust funding.
- CuriouslyC 4mo agoAI was already too big to fail, this just locks it in. Talk about a trojan horse.
- red-iron-pine 4mo agothis will be a disaster
- Havoc 4mo agoThis smells like an incoming bailout
- irthomasthomas 4mo agoThis feels more communist than communist China. They typically take about 1% in Golden Shares that give them a board seat.
- elil17 4mo agoIt seems that the US may be in a process of signing itself up for many of the drawbacks of Chinese-style state capitalism (regulatory conflicts of interest, opportunities for politicians to rent-seek) with stakes small enough that the taxpayer will see little real economic benefit.
- trymas 4mo agoThis. Though I’d say US is speeding with reimplementation of ruzzian style oligarchy (already happening with open corruption between government and broligarchs) with flavor of Chinese capitalism (this article).
- linguae 4mo agoI may be naïve or completely uninformed, but given the federal government’s vast resources, including supercomputers, national laboratories, the NSA, and many talented employees, why does the federal government need OpenAI or Anthropic for that matter when it has the resources to build its own LLM, even one exclusive for government use? The federal government has a long history of technical feats, such as the atomic bomb, the ARPANET, and the moon landing. Couldn’t it build its own state-of-the-art LLM?
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo agoSupercomputers aren't useful for training LLMs, and the best researchers would have politically infeasible pay requirements. I'm sure the government could acquire a bunch of GPUs and make it happen, if for some reason we had to, but it's easier to do outside of the government.
- ethbr1 4mo ago> I'm sure the government could acquire a bunch of GPUs and make it happen, if for some reason we had to, but it's easier to do outside of the government. That would be the right way of doing this, if the government were interested. Tax closed-model AI companies, buy Nvidia/AMD/Google hardware, build open-access datacenters, and offer access to academic labs with the caveat that resultant models must be open source.
- rchaud 4mo agoAll of these examples are Cold War era or before, when defense and aerospace was a much more collectivist venture with far less private sector involvement. After the Cold War, McKinsey and big 4 consultancies are working in every part of government, ostensibly to make government as efficient as the private sector. The NSA's surveillance program wouldn't have seen the light of day had Booz Allen not had a contract with them.
- michaelsbradley 4mo agoIt would not be without problems and mistakes in execution over time, but I think the US and our NATO allies should nationalize AI research and development in a sweeping manner, and NATO membership ought be revised to hinge on that. In the US, for example, all intellectual property of OpenAI, Anthropic, et al. would become public domain through custody of the Federal government, probably in an expansion of the NSF. All AI research and development would be required by law to be done in the open: open source code, transparent training data, reproducible models.
- throw1234567891 4mo agoOh, you have NATO allies now? And in the future what… “we leave NATO if you don’t buy enough “tokens”? Go and build a wall.
- michaelsbradley 4mo agoDonald won’t be POTUS too much longer, hang in there, less than 3 years to go.
- yde_java 4mo agoWith the USA and Israel tightening their intelligence agencies / secret service exchange, and now pulling in OpenAI -- that's a very effective strategy to exercise more worldly dominance
- I_am_tiberius 4mo agoSome advantages this gives OpenAI: - Altman takes away Musk's power as Trump's favourite tech friend. - the government won't punish OpenAI too hard, because it makes money when OpenAI does well. - the government can look at the user's data without any problems. - OpenAI's competitors are forced to give the government a share in their companies too. - when OpenAI sells shares to the public, investors will trust it more because the government is involved. - every American could get a yearly check from OpenAI's profits, so voters will protect OpenAI. - Sam Altman becomes friends with politicians from all sides, so nobody dares to investigate him.
- bushido 4mo agoNot a great move imo from a business stand point, given the heightened supply chain risk that global (non-US) corporations and sovereigns are already associating with the frontier labs. I like that it's going to drive more momentum towards the open source/weight models. I was hoping that it would be a slower burn though.
- AJRF 4mo agoI sound conspiratorial - but everything happening in the US around AI + Crypto has the fingerprints of David Sacks and Theil on it. You can hear them talk about these things and then they happen. Sacks has talked extensively about the US government having stakes in tech companies for months and months on the All In pod. It seems like saw Russian Oligarchs and instead of being morally repulsed they thought "hmm that is quite nice, I would like that"
- I_am_tiberius 4mo agoRussian Oligarchy is actually the best comparison there is.
- fuzzfactor 4mo agoThere's a huge difference between being shaken down highway robbery style "versus" pre-emptively paying the toll in advance for safe passage. I guess. It may not be obvious but isn't one unethical and the other not so much? For some operators they may highly prefer circumstances where it's impossible to tell the difference though.
- drtz 4mo ago> There's a huge difference between being shaken down highway robbery style "versus" pre-emptively paying the toll in advance for safe passage. We've seen the shakedown of Anthropic out in the open. It's reasonable to assume that Sam Altman has seen it as well.
- throw1234567891 4mo ago> It seems like saw Russian Oligarchs and instead of being morally repulsed they thought "hmm that is quite nice, I would like that" Trump was saying that for years. He admires Putin. And you guys have still elected him.
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- cdrnsf 4mo agoHow much is a 5% stake in a money pit really worth?
- throw1234567891 4mo agoZero until they turn a profit.
- cdrnsf 4mo agoUntil or, better yet, if.
- throw1234567891 4mo agoGotta give them the benefit of the doubt. But I agree.
- freakynit 4mo agoWe may not see it yet, but, this is a way to capture government and use that to suppress competition and any dissent. The moment the government owns equity, every regulatory decision becomes conflicted. The top 3-4 AI companies in whic the givernment owns equity, will become too politically entangled to fail or to let fail or be meaningfully competed against, or "allowed" to be competed against. This will also lead to drasitc increase in surveillance state since givernment will now have a fudiciary, and "political" duty to increase dividends, "for citizens". One way to do that will be to purchase large amounts of surveillance equipment and tech disguised as "safety". Any public dissent can now be indirectly suppressed by threatening with a perceived decrease in dividends or value of the sovereign wealth fund, thus, affecting healthcare, and other public expenditure. This also sets a very bad precedent for other governments to follow. This will end up with givernments of major nations to act in similar fashion, thus, expanding this dystopian setup further.
- tencentshill 4mo agoGood. Maybe this will incentivize a push to make the regulatory agencies truly independent, like the fed. the executive branch is clearly not up to the task.
- pseudalopex 4mo agoThe Supreme Court this week announced they would not allow independent regulatory agencies but the Federal Reserve.
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- wilkommen 4mo agoThis is just a way to keep the AI bubble going. The American people will not benefit from having a "stake" in AI companies. Doing so will serve only to expand the amount of capital available to AI companies for them to waste on a technology that will never live up to expectations. The US govt taking a "stake" in OpenAI and its competitors will only grant those organizations more power to further misallocate the nation's capital for their own enrichment. Instead of taking a stake, the US govt should use copyright and antitrust law to dismantle these companies and their backers in big tech, and shut this wasteful Ponzi scheme down, so that AI can find a role in the economy that suits its actual capabilities.
- bit-anarchist 4mo agoSad, but I'm unsurprised by this. Is it just me, or USA (or most modern governments) seem to be trying to copy China's economic and governmental model? Specially conservatives. I get the impression they are jealous of the PRC.