6 ms·

AI Fortunes Are Reviving an Old Debate About Private Power

45 points by ashurandi 2mo ago

dadjoker 2mo ago
[dead]
bix6 2mo ago
Higher corporate taxes and local control please, thanks.
- palmotea 2mo ago
  More regulation. Specifically requiring worker-owned means of production: re-organize the AI model companies as mutuals and mandate (by law) that their only customers can be individual-contributor-level workers or worker unions. Ditto with robotics.
  - dadjoker 2mo ago
    Yes, because communism has always worked out so well in the past.
    - 8note 2mo ago
      it seems to be working quite well in the present, if you look at china
      - gruez 2mo ago
        ...after they abandoned communism ("let some people and some regions get rich first") and liberalized their economy?
        palmotea 2mo ago
        They abandoned central planning, not state control of the economy. Unfortunately, their priority is not worker welfare, but more like national greatness. And they're performing way better than "capitalist" economies, which all look downright dysfunctional in pretty serious ways (e.g. selling off strategic manufacturing capacity to make a quick buck).
    - palmotea 2mo ago
      > Yes, because communism has always worked out so well in the past. Yeah, won't anyone think of the poor oligarchs, openly fantasizing about creating a permanent underclass? And the only thing that didn't work out well in the past was central planning by state-owned businesses with 20th century technology. The structure I proposed is nothing like that.
    - toivo 2mo ago
      Late-stage capitalism has always worked out so well in the future.
    - josefritzishere 2mo ago
      Capitalism is failing us right now. Why are you looking in the past?
      - stronglikedan 2mo ago
        I would look to the past, but only as far back as free market capitalism, to replace the crony capitalism that we have right now in the US. Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism. There's still time to correct course without that nonsense being involved.
        palmotea 2mo ago
        > I would look to the past, but only as far back as free market capitalism, to replace the crony capitalism that we have right now in the US. Free market capitalism won't save us from a future were automation reaches a point that it creates a large, unemployable underclass. And that's the future the tech and business elite have been promising us (at least until they belatedly realized that was the quiet part they shouldn't be saying out loud). I'm going to take their word on those promises, when considering regulation to constrain them. > Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism. There's still time to correct course without that nonsense being involved. I would like a communism that is basically capitalism, but with the capital more-or-less evenly distributed among the workers. Keep a lot of the economic system, but replace it with other things: mutuals, worker-owned businesses, maybe 50-50 JVs between labor and investors, some "all of the above" combination, etc.
        miyoji 2mo ago
        [dead]
        well_ackshually 2mo ago
        Ah yes, the most capitalistic country on the planet, where billionaires quite literally buy out public officials isn't capitalistic enough, and isn't "real capitalism". Watch out, you're almost sounding like the "not real communism" boys. >Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism. Some would say leaving a few million people die of thirst and hunger every year because it's "not profitable to fix it", or having a population of dozens of millions in your own country suffering of mental health problems, inability to get basic healthcare or even living conditions for the past 50 years might be a sign that your favorite system is fundamentally immoral, but hey.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
    This doesn't solve any of the problems. It's not a 19th century factory running on leather-belt-harnessed steam engines. There aren't 10,000 workers. There are at most a few dozen "individual-contributor-level workers". You're still concentrating all of that onto a really small number of people. Who, incidentally, have demonstrated time and again that their behavior tends to imitate the big powerful robber barons' behavior of old (because there are relatively few of them and no one to dilute the aggregate back to your preferred leftist mindsets). You've really lost the plot.
    - palmotea 2mo ago
      > You've really lost the plot. I think you did. > There aren't 10,000 workers. There are at most a few dozen "individual-contributor-level workers". You're still concentrating all of that onto a really small number of people. Who, incidentally, have demonstrated time and again that their behavior tends to imitate the big powerful robber barons' behavior of old You're not clear here, but it sounds like you're talking about employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. But then you misunderstood me. I was talking about the workers who use the tools those companies make. In the plan in my comment * OpenAI, Anthropic, employees would be working for a mutual, as in a customer-owned company. Those "few dozen" robber barons wannabes wouldn't be getting any big payout. * The workers I was referring to were all the employees who use AI tools to perform a job. They would be the only customers of OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. in their personal capacities. Their employers would not be allowed to buy those tools directly, they'd have to hire a worker to use them, who could then capture a lot of the value instead of the company.
  - snickerbockers 2mo ago
    >worker-owned means of production On a similar note I keep thinking that having your "content" used as training material for a model ought to entitle you to a proportional stake.
    - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
      Do the math on that one. There are 8 billion people. OpenAI revenue -- not profit -- is ~$25B, which is ~$3/year. That's if they have zero expenses for engineers or land or equipment or electricity, which isn't the case now and never will be. Their current profit is a number of substantial magnitude with a minus sign in front of it. The funny thing about all of this is that it's basically taking revenue from the major media companies to the benefit of OpenAI's customers more than OpenAI itself, which is exactly the redistribution of wealth people seem to be demanding, but that's not how it gets characterized because the media companies are the ones characterizing it. And there is some case to be made that disincentivizing human content creation is bad, but what that case really looks like is the argument against having the AI users free ride on an investment made by Sony or Comcast. Then what their proposals end up looking like is a tax paid by everyone where the money goes to those huge corporations. And of all the things we shouldn't do about this, that's the thing we shouldn't do the most.
      - snickerbockers 2mo ago
        Its obviously impractical for a number of reasons, I just find it frustrating because based on the last century of IP law that should be what's happening. The big corporations won the fight on file-sharing so they ought to at least be accountable to their own legal arguments.
        AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
        > Its obviously impractical for a number of reasons, I just find it frustrating because based on the last century of IP law that should be what's happening. Eh. Most LLM output is significantly transformative. The challenge here is that some of the output is similar enough to a work in the training data that it could reasonably be considered derivative. And evaluating whether it is when you have both of them in front of you isn't even the hard part. The real problem, from the perspective of LLM users, is that you don't know when it's happening because you haven't seen the original work to notice how similar it is to a particular output, and now maybe you have problems if you start making copies of it. > The big corporations won the fight on file-sharing so they ought to at least be accountable to their own legal arguments. Those big corporations are the likes of Sony and Comcast. They're the ones who would prefer to be able to sue OpenAI. But that's also the thing which is trash, because if the money went only to them then it's just propping up the incumbents while spitting on small independent content creators who get nothing. Whereas if you actually included everybody then we're back to ~$3/year and it's not even worth the administrative costs compared to just having them pay ordinary taxes on their profits to the extent that they eventually have any.
  - xhkkffbf 2mo ago
    You realize that the folks with these fortunes are the workers who built the companies, right? If there's one place that's "worked-owned" it's a startup. And the VCs who also ended up with stocks did quite a bit of work along the way-- as well as investing capital. We're not talking about widows with a pension who are just interested in dividends. This isn't some utility.
    - wolvesechoes 2mo ago
      > If there's one place that's "worked-owned" it's a startup. Sweetie, it is called cooperative, not startup.
      - xhkkffbf 2mo ago
        Odd that you're choosing sexist language like that. Are startups not owned by the people who work there? Cooperatives are more complicated legal structures, usually designed to unify a group of producers like farmers. The workers at cooperatives are often paid an hourly wage and nothing more.
    - bygosh 2mo ago
      no offense but it doesn't sound like you understand what worker owned means. you straight up just described capital owned.
      - xhkkffbf 2mo ago
        Do the workers at a startup own shares? That means the workers own part of the company. If they chose to raise more capital, that's their decision. Even the most socialist leaning coffee shop will raise capital to pay for capital improvements.
        JoeAltmaier 2mo ago
        A nice thought. But the early options/shares issued at a startup have been gamed to the point that only the principals can ever get a significant cash payout. THe rest of the employee shares are of a special class that may as well be called 'worthless paper'.
  - AlexandrB 2mo ago
    > worker-owned means of production Sounds great! If I'm a worker who owns the means of production and I want to sell that stake to someone else, am I allowed to do so? If not, do I actually "own" anything?
    - well_ackshually 2mo ago
      No, the means of productions are owned by _the workers_, not by you as an individual. You want to stop working there? You're welcome to trade your spot with another worker. And before any "uuuuh this can't work uuuh people want to get rich uuuh", you are literally talking about the community that has made open source software, the most commie thing imaginable on earth.
- Dig1t 2mo ago
  Isn’t this basically the situation in Europe? It seems like that just supercharges brain drain by incentivizing all the smartest and richest people to just move away to a place with lower taxes and less bureaucracy.
  - 8note 2mo ago
    i dont think we know enough to say it does. if the trend remains without the USD being the reserve currency then maybe? Id lean as a first guess that easy access to lots of free money is the bigger driver
    - Dig1t 2mo ago
      How does the USD reserve currency impact this? Billionaires can hold the global reserve currency in a different country/state with lower taxes and less bureaucracy. e.g. Marc Andreessen can move to a different state or country and start incentivizing companies to form in that new jurisdiction. We are seeing this already with many corps relocating from California to Texas. >lots of free money What do you mean by free money? Who's getting free money from whom?
- AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
  Is there some way to disabuse people of the notion that higher taxes would help here? Taxes don't really affect entity size. In significant ways they do the opposite, because business expenses are deductions, so using profits for expansion becomes more favored over paying them out as dividends the more you increase the tax rate. What you need here is antitrust enforcement and lower barriers to entry so that there are more companies that are each smaller, and correspondingly more millionaires and fewer billionaires.
  - nicoburns 2mo ago
    > Taxes don't really affect entity size. A progressive tax would, no? You could explicitly tax larger entities more.
    - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
      Using graduated rates for corporations isn't used because it doesn't work. The formal entity size is disconnected from the business size. How many entities is "Google"? Is it one or is Search one company and Android another and YouTube another and so on? If they need to get the size of each unit below some threshold they can just file more LLCs. Just use the size of the parent company, you say? Okay, which is the parent company, Google or Vanguard? If it's Vanguard then every public company exceeds the largest size threshold. If it isn't, they can use something which is formally an investment fund as the parent company and get as big as they want. And even if you could do it, you would then create a perverse incentive for the government, because then breaking up those large companies into smaller ones would reduce tax revenue. When you should just break them up to begin with and actually solve the problem.
      - nicoburns 2mo ago
        > Just use the size of the parent company, you say? Okay, which is the parent company, Google or Vanguard? Could you maybe tie it back to majority control? Alphabet is one company because it actually has a controlling stake over Google, YouTube, Android, etc. Whereas Vanguard is just a minority shareholder in Google. > And even if you could do it, you would then create a perverse incentive for the government, because then breaking up those large companies into smaller ones would reduce tax revenue. When you should just break them up to begin with and actually solve the problem. The idea is that you wouldn't need to government to actively break up companies, they'd do it themselves (or get outcompeted). I will admit that this is very much unproven theory though (but I'd certainly be interested in people investigating the theory more formally if nothing else).
unwise-exe 2mo ago
Not much of an AI thing, just the standard "rich people should have (control over) their resources confiscated" that keeps popping up in various forms.
contubernio 2mo ago
Philanthropy reflects a failure of the state to realize it's most basic functions.

45 points by ashurandi 2mo ago

dadjoker 2mo ago

[dead]

bix6 2mo ago

Higher corporate taxes and local control please, thanks.

palmotea 2mo ago
More regulation. Specifically requiring worker-owned means of production: re-organize the AI model companies as mutuals and mandate (by law) that their only customers can be individual-contributor-level workers or worker unions. Ditto with robotics.
- dadjoker 2mo ago
  Yes, because communism has always worked out so well in the past.
  - 8note 2mo ago
    it seems to be working quite well in the present, if you look at china
    - gruez 2mo ago
      ...after they abandoned communism ("let some people and some regions get rich first") and liberalized their economy?
      - palmotea 2mo ago
        They abandoned central planning, not state control of the economy. Unfortunately, their priority is not worker welfare, but more like national greatness. And they're performing way better than "capitalist" economies, which all look downright dysfunctional in pretty serious ways (e.g. selling off strategic manufacturing capacity to make a quick buck).
  - palmotea 2mo ago
    > Yes, because communism has always worked out so well in the past. Yeah, won't anyone think of the poor oligarchs, openly fantasizing about creating a permanent underclass? And the only thing that didn't work out well in the past was central planning by state-owned businesses with 20th century technology. The structure I proposed is nothing like that.
  - toivo 2mo ago
    Late-stage capitalism has always worked out so well in the future.
  - josefritzishere 2mo ago
    Capitalism is failing us right now. Why are you looking in the past?
    - stronglikedan 2mo ago
      I would look to the past, but only as far back as free market capitalism, to replace the crony capitalism that we have right now in the US. Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism. There's still time to correct course without that nonsense being involved.
      - palmotea 2mo ago
        > I would look to the past, but only as far back as free market capitalism, to replace the crony capitalism that we have right now in the US. Free market capitalism won't save us from a future were automation reaches a point that it creates a large, unemployable underclass. And that's the future the tech and business elite have been promising us (at least until they belatedly realized that was the quiet part they shouldn't be saying out loud). I'm going to take their word on those promises, when considering regulation to constrain them. > Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism. There's still time to correct course without that nonsense being involved. I would like a communism that is basically capitalism, but with the capital more-or-less evenly distributed among the workers. Keep a lot of the economic system, but replace it with other things: mutuals, worker-owned businesses, maybe 50-50 JVs between labor and investors, some "all of the above" combination, etc.
        miyoji 2mo ago
        [dead]
      - well_ackshually 2mo ago
        Ah yes, the most capitalistic country on the planet, where billionaires quite literally buy out public officials isn't capitalistic enough, and isn't "real capitalism". Watch out, you're almost sounding like the "not real communism" boys. >Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism. Some would say leaving a few million people die of thirst and hunger every year because it's "not profitable to fix it", or having a population of dozens of millions in your own country suffering of mental health problems, inability to get basic healthcare or even living conditions for the past 50 years might be a sign that your favorite system is fundamentally immoral, but hey.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
  This doesn't solve any of the problems. It's not a 19th century factory running on leather-belt-harnessed steam engines. There aren't 10,000 workers. There are at most a few dozen "individual-contributor-level workers". You're still concentrating all of that onto a really small number of people. Who, incidentally, have demonstrated time and again that their behavior tends to imitate the big powerful robber barons' behavior of old (because there are relatively few of them and no one to dilute the aggregate back to your preferred leftist mindsets). You've really lost the plot.
  - palmotea 2mo ago
    > You've really lost the plot. I think you did. > There aren't 10,000 workers. There are at most a few dozen "individual-contributor-level workers". You're still concentrating all of that onto a really small number of people. Who, incidentally, have demonstrated time and again that their behavior tends to imitate the big powerful robber barons' behavior of old You're not clear here, but it sounds like you're talking about employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. But then you misunderstood me. I was talking about the workers who use the tools those companies make. In the plan in my comment * OpenAI, Anthropic, employees would be working for a mutual, as in a customer-owned company. Those "few dozen" robber barons wannabes wouldn't be getting any big payout. * The workers I was referring to were all the employees who use AI tools to perform a job. They would be the only customers of OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. in their personal capacities. Their employers would not be allowed to buy those tools directly, they'd have to hire a worker to use them, who could then capture a lot of the value instead of the company.
- snickerbockers 2mo ago
  >worker-owned means of production On a similar note I keep thinking that having your "content" used as training material for a model ought to entitle you to a proportional stake.
  - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
    Do the math on that one. There are 8 billion people. OpenAI revenue -- not profit -- is ~$25B, which is ~$3/year. That's if they have zero expenses for engineers or land or equipment or electricity, which isn't the case now and never will be. Their current profit is a number of substantial magnitude with a minus sign in front of it. The funny thing about all of this is that it's basically taking revenue from the major media companies to the benefit of OpenAI's customers more than OpenAI itself, which is exactly the redistribution of wealth people seem to be demanding, but that's not how it gets characterized because the media companies are the ones characterizing it. And there is some case to be made that disincentivizing human content creation is bad, but what that case really looks like is the argument against having the AI users free ride on an investment made by Sony or Comcast. Then what their proposals end up looking like is a tax paid by everyone where the money goes to those huge corporations. And of all the things we shouldn't do about this, that's the thing we shouldn't do the most.
    - snickerbockers 2mo ago
      Its obviously impractical for a number of reasons, I just find it frustrating because based on the last century of IP law that should be what's happening. The big corporations won the fight on file-sharing so they ought to at least be accountable to their own legal arguments.
      - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
        > Its obviously impractical for a number of reasons, I just find it frustrating because based on the last century of IP law that should be what's happening. Eh. Most LLM output is significantly transformative. The challenge here is that some of the output is similar enough to a work in the training data that it could reasonably be considered derivative. And evaluating whether it is when you have both of them in front of you isn't even the hard part. The real problem, from the perspective of LLM users, is that you don't know when it's happening because you haven't seen the original work to notice how similar it is to a particular output, and now maybe you have problems if you start making copies of it. > The big corporations won the fight on file-sharing so they ought to at least be accountable to their own legal arguments. Those big corporations are the likes of Sony and Comcast. They're the ones who would prefer to be able to sue OpenAI. But that's also the thing which is trash, because if the money went only to them then it's just propping up the incumbents while spitting on small independent content creators who get nothing. Whereas if you actually included everybody then we're back to ~$3/year and it's not even worth the administrative costs compared to just having them pay ordinary taxes on their profits to the extent that they eventually have any.
- xhkkffbf 2mo ago
  You realize that the folks with these fortunes are the workers who built the companies, right? If there's one place that's "worked-owned" it's a startup. And the VCs who also ended up with stocks did quite a bit of work along the way-- as well as investing capital. We're not talking about widows with a pension who are just interested in dividends. This isn't some utility.
  - wolvesechoes 2mo ago
    > If there's one place that's "worked-owned" it's a startup. Sweetie, it is called cooperative, not startup.
    - xhkkffbf 2mo ago
      Odd that you're choosing sexist language like that. Are startups not owned by the people who work there? Cooperatives are more complicated legal structures, usually designed to unify a group of producers like farmers. The workers at cooperatives are often paid an hourly wage and nothing more.
  - bygosh 2mo ago
    no offense but it doesn't sound like you understand what worker owned means. you straight up just described capital owned.
    - xhkkffbf 2mo ago
      Do the workers at a startup own shares? That means the workers own part of the company. If they chose to raise more capital, that's their decision. Even the most socialist leaning coffee shop will raise capital to pay for capital improvements.
      - JoeAltmaier 2mo ago
        A nice thought. But the early options/shares issued at a startup have been gamed to the point that only the principals can ever get a significant cash payout. THe rest of the employee shares are of a special class that may as well be called 'worthless paper'.
- AlexandrB 2mo ago
  > worker-owned means of production Sounds great! If I'm a worker who owns the means of production and I want to sell that stake to someone else, am I allowed to do so? If not, do I actually "own" anything?
  - well_ackshually 2mo ago
    No, the means of productions are owned by _the workers_, not by you as an individual. You want to stop working there? You're welcome to trade your spot with another worker. And before any "uuuuh this can't work uuuh people want to get rich uuuh", you are literally talking about the community that has made open source software, the most commie thing imaginable on earth.
Dig1t 2mo ago
Isn’t this basically the situation in Europe? It seems like that just supercharges brain drain by incentivizing all the smartest and richest people to just move away to a place with lower taxes and less bureaucracy.
- 8note 2mo ago
  i dont think we know enough to say it does. if the trend remains without the USD being the reserve currency then maybe? Id lean as a first guess that easy access to lots of free money is the bigger driver
  - Dig1t 2mo ago
    How does the USD reserve currency impact this? Billionaires can hold the global reserve currency in a different country/state with lower taxes and less bureaucracy. e.g. Marc Andreessen can move to a different state or country and start incentivizing companies to form in that new jurisdiction. We are seeing this already with many corps relocating from California to Texas. >lots of free money What do you mean by free money? Who's getting free money from whom?
AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
Is there some way to disabuse people of the notion that higher taxes would help here? Taxes don't really affect entity size. In significant ways they do the opposite, because business expenses are deductions, so using profits for expansion becomes more favored over paying them out as dividends the more you increase the tax rate. What you need here is antitrust enforcement and lower barriers to entry so that there are more companies that are each smaller, and correspondingly more millionaires and fewer billionaires.
- nicoburns 2mo ago
  > Taxes don't really affect entity size. A progressive tax would, no? You could explicitly tax larger entities more.
  - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
    Using graduated rates for corporations isn't used because it doesn't work. The formal entity size is disconnected from the business size. How many entities is "Google"? Is it one or is Search one company and Android another and YouTube another and so on? If they need to get the size of each unit below some threshold they can just file more LLCs. Just use the size of the parent company, you say? Okay, which is the parent company, Google or Vanguard? If it's Vanguard then every public company exceeds the largest size threshold. If it isn't, they can use something which is formally an investment fund as the parent company and get as big as they want. And even if you could do it, you would then create a perverse incentive for the government, because then breaking up those large companies into smaller ones would reduce tax revenue. When you should just break them up to begin with and actually solve the problem.
    - nicoburns 2mo ago
      > Just use the size of the parent company, you say? Okay, which is the parent company, Google or Vanguard? Could you maybe tie it back to majority control? Alphabet is one company because it actually has a controlling stake over Google, YouTube, Android, etc. Whereas Vanguard is just a minority shareholder in Google. > And even if you could do it, you would then create a perverse incentive for the government, because then breaking up those large companies into smaller ones would reduce tax revenue. When you should just break them up to begin with and actually solve the problem. The idea is that you wouldn't need to government to actively break up companies, they'd do it themselves (or get outcompeted). I will admit that this is very much unproven theory though (but I'd certainly be interested in people investigating the theory more formally if nothing else).

unwise-exe 2mo ago

Not much of an AI thing, just the standard "rich people should have (control over) their resources confiscated" that keeps popping up in various forms.

contubernio 2mo ago

Philanthropy reflects a failure of the state to realize it's most basic functions.