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This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " I'm in Australia. I've contributed my share of dirt to

This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " I'm in Australia. I've contributed my share of dirt to the delta. Why do I not get a share of this? I get that the frontier companies are (for the moment) US companies. But that's just corporate ownership, it's not what we're talking about. We're talking about compensating the people who wrote the training data for their contribution. That contribution came from all over the world, so the Corpus Fund needs to be paid all over the world. Set it up in the UN, get the UN to provide the training data sets as a common good, and have the UN collect the money from all AI companies using the training data sets. And the UN should distribute the money in the most equitable manner globally (so most of it going to alleviate poverty, probably). I'd happily trade my collected years of shitposts to help folks get out of poverty.

martialg 3mo ago
Author here. Thanks for reading! I have additional essays coming out that will address this exact issue and other issues I know that people will raise. I’m building the essays series around arguing for practical policy I believe can get implemented and am sequencing it as thoughtfully as I can. I just can’t fit every argument into every essay.
- marcus_holmes 3mo ago
  It's a great idea, I hope you get traction with it :) I am personally coming to the conclusion that having these vast repositories of knowledge that can actually talk to us is actually great. We have some issues to solve, but the end-state of having a global repository of all knowledge that can talk to us and answer questions is actually an amazing outcome. We just need to solve those problems first; mostly getting past the AI bubble and the massive over-investment, and then solving the hallucination problems. I don't believe either of them are insoluble. I do worry about how future generations move on from this, though. In the same way that 90's music is still effectively the zeitgeist, and we will never move on from that, because of the way that streaming services work. It's a rare new band that can compete with (e.g.) Nirvana when appealing to that segment of audience, a competition that Nirvana themselves didn't have. So we are effectively locking in Nirvana as The Disaffected Youth Grunge Band for the rest of eternity. So similarly, we are in danger of locking in the current state of the world to the training data, and never being able to move on from that, because any new zeitgeist has to compete with this one on unequal footing.
  - archagon 3mo ago
    Imagine that AI lives up to its promise, gets captured by a handful of corporations, and ushers in a world of untouchable über-oligarchs that de facto rule the world. Would it have been worth it then? Can this problem even be solved?
    - marcus_holmes 3mo ago
      I mean, yes, that's one possible outcome. I personally believe that it's more likely that the current batch of massively overleveraged AI companies go broke in the next year or so as the AI bubble bursts. Hopefully the USA manages to get its democratic shit together enough to not bail them out (as happened in 2008), and they just... stop. The OSS models are almost at the same level, and are progressing fine. The technology continues to be useful, even if all the oligarchs go away.
      - dd8601fn 3mo ago
        My spidey sense goes off when we refer to open weight models from Chinese companies trained against frontier models as OSS... as if it was some Torvalds types maintaining a public git repo. I think those open weight models exist because openai, anthropic, and google rule the roost. And I don't think things would continue as-is if those guys implode.
        marcus_holmes 3mo ago
        The technology has certainly moved faster because of all the money thrown at it recently, but it existed before that, and was progressing before that. So no, I think OpenAI, Anthropic only exist because of the open-weight models (that came before them) rather than the other way around. Google is a special case; they invented the transformer and then published it instead of commercialising it, so they actually weren't evil (for once), or they didn't realise what they'd done until too late. I think things will continue perfectly fine if those guys implode. They didn't invent the technology, they're not the people who are advancing it most (because everything they do is proprietary and undisclosed), and their efforts at commercialising it are just getting in the way of the real research.
- martialg 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- Beijinger 3mo ago
  This reminds me of: Ideas are like hemorrhoids, every asshole sooner or later gets some. ;-) This is not going to happen: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/m...
wwind123 3mo ago
I agree UN sounds like a good organization to help distribute the wealth created by AI to the world. But this idea won't be considered by the current U.S. administration. In that case what other countries can do is probably to tax the AI companies at rates higher than regular companies.
- marcus_holmes 3mo ago
  The USA helped form the UN as specifically the organisation to do exactly this kind of thing. It's a shame the current administration can't play nicely with others. The current administration is also playing strange games about export controls (can we run Fable yet? Kinda. Maybe). I think if they keep this up they'll just be shooting the US AI industry in the foot and the Chinese models will take over as the frontier models. Maybe the UN can levy the USA for this, and leave the USA to collect that levy from its AI companies.
  - strictnein 3mo ago
    The US formed the UN to distribute funds? > Maybe the UN can levy the USA for this The UN has no "levy" powers.
    - marcus_holmes 3mo ago
      True, good point.
- nradov 3mo ago
  Do you really want countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea to have a vote in wealth redistribution?
  - abalashov 3mo ago
    I suppose countries like KSA and DPRK would ask the same question about us.
    - 3mo ago
tptacek 3mo ago
Why do you think a UN-hosted process would work? Has the UN done similarly intrusive things before and been effective at it? How do you account for Chinese frontier and open weights models, which are just months behind American models and subsidized by a sovereign state that does not share any of these premises about intellectual property? A lot of these posts seem subtextually premised on the idea that it's possible to put the genie back into the bottle; that if frontier labs in America didn't sign on to this tolling scheme, our recourse would be to halt the progression of AI completely. But that option does not exist, unless we're going to fight a world war to create it.
- MichaelZuo 3mo ago
  This comment seems incoherent? Even if the UN only has a very small amount of legitimacy and credibility… that’s still far far better than literally zero.
  - tptacek 3mo ago
    Well, I mean, the alternative is for a US-based process to be put into place, followed (or led) by an EU process. The premise of my comment is that no matter who hosts the process, China isn't going to comply, so it really just comes down to the US and Europe.
    - MichaelZuo 3mo ago
      What? There are over 190 nations in the UN. Even if we assume a chunk have no credible claim whatsoever, that’s still well over a hundred.
      - tptacek 3mo ago
        There are not in fact 100 nations that will seriously contend for frontier models.
        MichaelZuo 3mo ago
nradov 3mo ago
[flagged]
- verisimi 3mo ago
  No one asked you about this. Your government is free to spend its money as it likes, it can send it to the UN.
antonvs 3mo ago
> I'd happily trade my collected years of shitposts to help folks get out of poverty. In other words, you'd happily do nothing to help folks get out of poverty?
- marcus_holmes 3mo ago
  I was referring to the potential of actually collecting some of this fund. But yes, essentially in this situation that is correct - I would be doing nothing and also helping people get out of poverty.
imrehg 3mo ago
As long as places like Taiwan are effectively blocked from being in the UN[0], I don't believe we should be adding more to their power and responsibilities than what they have now, au contraire! If it was a truly world representation, this might be different. But if things like health are sacrificed (ie. no WHO access either), I don't think they really deserve the benefit of the doubt. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_and_the_United_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_and_the_United_Nations
supriyo-biswas 3mo ago
> This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " There could be so many other ways to set this up. Enforce a higher tax on any business selling AI models that have capabilities greater than some threshold, and use it to fund development and infrastructure project like roads, hospitals, schools, etc. Or you could even do a negative income tax[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
- marcus_holmes 3mo ago
  Agreed. And someone has to manage and enforce that on a global level. Which is what we built the UN for.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    The UN is a voluntary association with no enforcement power, like the EU, the WIPO, and the IETF
- martialg 3mo ago
  Author here. Thanks for reading. I agree there are a lot of levers we can pull to work towards something better. I've structured this essay series as a sequence of nested regulatory solutions so in the next few essays I propose additional structures with instruments like this. They're sequenced in a way I believe that can be pragmatically implemented and start showing progress in the next decade or so by the US. So stay tuned!
martialg 3mo ago
[flagged]
aethelyon 3mo ago
100% — publish the hidden research, the value is in the discoveries, not in the dividend. With all due respect to the author, it feels like he missed the entire lesson of history.
aj_hackman 3mo ago
Who would pay you? OpenAI has between $600 billion and $1.4 trillion in debt, and no hope for profitability. Anthropic, who have a much more modest $35 billion in debt (by using Sam Altman as a human shield), also has no chance of ever being in the black, pending some freak event.

martialg 3mo ago

Author here. Thanks for reading! I have additional essays coming out that will address this exact issue and other issues I know that people will raise. I’m building the essays series around arguing for practical policy I believe can get implemented and am sequencing it as thoughtfully as I can. I just can’t fit every argument into every essay.

marcus_holmes 3mo ago
It's a great idea, I hope you get traction with it :) I am personally coming to the conclusion that having these vast repositories of knowledge that can actually talk to us is actually great. We have some issues to solve, but the end-state of having a global repository of all knowledge that can talk to us and answer questions is actually an amazing outcome. We just need to solve those problems first; mostly getting past the AI bubble and the massive over-investment, and then solving the hallucination problems. I don't believe either of them are insoluble. I do worry about how future generations move on from this, though. In the same way that 90's music is still effectively the zeitgeist, and we will never move on from that, because of the way that streaming services work. It's a rare new band that can compete with (e.g.) Nirvana when appealing to that segment of audience, a competition that Nirvana themselves didn't have. So we are effectively locking in Nirvana as The Disaffected Youth Grunge Band for the rest of eternity. So similarly, we are in danger of locking in the current state of the world to the training data, and never being able to move on from that, because any new zeitgeist has to compete with this one on unequal footing.
- archagon 3mo ago
  Imagine that AI lives up to its promise, gets captured by a handful of corporations, and ushers in a world of untouchable über-oligarchs that de facto rule the world. Would it have been worth it then? Can this problem even be solved?
  - marcus_holmes 3mo ago
    I mean, yes, that's one possible outcome. I personally believe that it's more likely that the current batch of massively overleveraged AI companies go broke in the next year or so as the AI bubble bursts. Hopefully the USA manages to get its democratic shit together enough to not bail them out (as happened in 2008), and they just... stop. The OSS models are almost at the same level, and are progressing fine. The technology continues to be useful, even if all the oligarchs go away.
    - dd8601fn 3mo ago
      My spidey sense goes off when we refer to open weight models from Chinese companies trained against frontier models as OSS... as if it was some Torvalds types maintaining a public git repo. I think those open weight models exist because openai, anthropic, and google rule the roost. And I don't think things would continue as-is if those guys implode.
      - marcus_holmes 3mo ago
        The technology has certainly moved faster because of all the money thrown at it recently, but it existed before that, and was progressing before that. So no, I think OpenAI, Anthropic only exist because of the open-weight models (that came before them) rather than the other way around. Google is a special case; they invented the transformer and then published it instead of commercialising it, so they actually weren't evil (for once), or they didn't realise what they'd done until too late. I think things will continue perfectly fine if those guys implode. They didn't invent the technology, they're not the people who are advancing it most (because everything they do is proprietary and undisclosed), and their efforts at commercialising it are just getting in the way of the real research.
martialg 3mo ago
[flagged]
Beijinger 3mo ago
This reminds me of: Ideas are like hemorrhoids, every asshole sooner or later gets some. ;-) This is not going to happen: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/m...

wwind123 3mo ago

I agree UN sounds like a good organization to help distribute the wealth created by AI to the world. But this idea won't be considered by the current U.S. administration. In that case what other countries can do is probably to tax the AI companies at rates higher than regular companies.

marcus_holmes 3mo ago
The USA helped form the UN as specifically the organisation to do exactly this kind of thing. It's a shame the current administration can't play nicely with others. The current administration is also playing strange games about export controls (can we run Fable yet? Kinda. Maybe). I think if they keep this up they'll just be shooting the US AI industry in the foot and the Chinese models will take over as the frontier models. Maybe the UN can levy the USA for this, and leave the USA to collect that levy from its AI companies.
- strictnein 3mo ago
  The US formed the UN to distribute funds? > Maybe the UN can levy the USA for this The UN has no "levy" powers.
  - marcus_holmes 3mo ago
    True, good point.
nradov 3mo ago
Do you really want countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea to have a vote in wealth redistribution?
- abalashov 3mo ago
  I suppose countries like KSA and DPRK would ask the same question about us.
  - 3mo ago

tptacek 3mo ago

Why do you think a UN-hosted process would work? Has the UN done similarly intrusive things before and been effective at it? How do you account for Chinese frontier and open weights models, which are just months behind American models and subsidized by a sovereign state that does not share any of these premises about intellectual property? A lot of these posts seem subtextually premised on the idea that it's possible to put the genie back into the bottle; that if frontier labs in America didn't sign on to this tolling scheme, our recourse would be to halt the progression of AI completely. But that option does not exist, unless we're going to fight a world war to create it.

MichaelZuo 3mo ago
This comment seems incoherent? Even if the UN only has a very small amount of legitimacy and credibility… that’s still far far better than literally zero.
- tptacek 3mo ago
  Well, I mean, the alternative is for a US-based process to be put into place, followed (or led) by an EU process. The premise of my comment is that no matter who hosts the process, China isn't going to comply, so it really just comes down to the US and Europe.
  - MichaelZuo 3mo ago
    What? There are over 190 nations in the UN. Even if we assume a chunk have no credible claim whatsoever, that’s still well over a hundred.
    - tptacek 3mo ago
      There are not in fact 100 nations that will seriously contend for frontier models.
      - MichaelZuo 3mo ago

nradov 3mo ago

[flagged]

verisimi 3mo ago
No one asked you about this. Your government is free to spend its money as it likes, it can send it to the UN.

antonvs 3mo ago

> I'd happily trade my collected years of shitposts to help folks get out of poverty. In other words, you'd happily do nothing to help folks get out of poverty?

marcus_holmes 3mo ago
I was referring to the potential of actually collecting some of this fund. But yes, essentially in this situation that is correct - I would be doing nothing and also helping people get out of poverty.

imrehg 3mo ago

As long as places like Taiwan are effectively blocked from being in the UN[0], I don't believe we should be adding more to their power and responsibilities than what they have now, au contraire! If it was a truly world representation, this might be different. But if things like health are sacrificed (ie. no WHO access either), I don't think they really deserve the benefit of the doubt. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_and_the_United_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_and_the_United_Nations

supriyo-biswas 3mo ago

> This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " There could be so many other ways to set this up. Enforce a higher tax on any business selling AI models that have capabilities greater than some threshold, and use it to fund development and infrastructure project like roads, hospitals, schools, etc. Or you could even do a negative income tax[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

marcus_holmes 3mo ago
Agreed. And someone has to manage and enforce that on a global level. Which is what we built the UN for.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  The UN is a voluntary association with no enforcement power, like the EU, the WIPO, and the IETF
martialg 3mo ago
Author here. Thanks for reading. I agree there are a lot of levers we can pull to work towards something better. I've structured this essay series as a sequence of nested regulatory solutions so in the next few essays I propose additional structures with instruments like this. They're sequenced in a way I believe that can be pragmatically implemented and start showing progress in the next decade or so by the US. So stay tuned!

martialg 3mo ago

[flagged]

aethelyon 3mo ago

100% — publish the hidden research, the value is in the discoveries, not in the dividend. With all due respect to the author, it feels like he missed the entire lesson of history.

aj_hackman 3mo ago

Who would pay you? OpenAI has between $600 billion and $1.4 trillion in debt, and no hope for profitability. Anthropic, who have a much more modest $35 billion in debt (by using Sam Altman as a human shield), also has no chance of ever being in the black, pending some freak event.