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

> A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations

I know many here would scoff at nationalizing a private company, but AI is a usurpation of human knowledge and quite literally at times. (Every AI company was embroiled in copyright lawsuits and lord knows what Qwen et al are up to.)

In turn, everyone knows labor displacement is coming. My bet is the next recession will end up being brutal for this reason. To me, labor displacement and the social consequences are a potentially *catastrophic* negative externality. Should not there be a tax to offset the "frictional" unemployment? What happens when people lose a high skill job and will no longer be able to afford their mortgage?

Also, why are people always talking about AI as if its an angel or satan? The degree to which we're doomed is an open question, much like a tornado... so why aren't we thinking about taxes on AI like a tornado insurance fund?

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...

Strictly speaking, the big A.I. companies _want_ the public to own half of them. Passively. In index ETFs in their 401(k)s and other retirement portfolios. That way the get all the money without any of the actual influence.

I love it, this is exactly the kind of thing government is meant to do, bring externalities to profit under control. There is something that's been stolen from all of us, collectively, and certain authors and artists, specifically, the creative soul we all pour into our expression, here, there, and everywhere online.

I yeeted my Reddit account as soon as I learned it was being used, without my consent, to train AI. I now have regrets, that I didn't delete all my comments there recursively first. However, because everything I posted there (and I posted quite a bit!) is part of the training data, it's interesting to know that every future AI is going to have a little bit of my resistance to authority, and lateral thinking, and just a bit of uppity in it, because of me. ;-)

So, to yank part of the profits from our stolen soul back, via a TAX, seems quite reasonable to this Citizen of the United States. No money going out, just asserting authority, and collecting something on behalf of all of us, is a brilliant strategy for offsetting part of the theft they did first.

The public should own more than half. Via the stock market. Where public shareholders can vote in elections to control the Board of Directors, and elect Directors that act in the fiduciary interests of shareholders, and return excess capital to shareholders by issuing dividends. Where any member of the public can decide to buy or sell shares, being the most important development in the democratization of wealth development in all of human history, second only to the index fund that let members of the public put wealth development on autopilot?

When did public ownership mean that the government needed to be the owner? And when did we start to allow companies to float so few shares that public shareholder voting rights became largely meaningless?

Taking 50% of a few valuable companies for no compensation is just expropriation. Not that this has political legs, but even if it did, expect an enormous fight. The more obviously legal (and stupendously expensive) route would be eminent domain.

Lately I've been thinking about digital co-ops. Imagine a member owned server farm for running private AI models and cloud services. It could be small, like a neighborhood or citywide project running on cobbled together used hardware like that post the other day where someone got an older server GPU running on his PC. Or it could be a small data center for small businesses and individual users to use. Members could have more privacy than giving all their data to companies like Google and they could have a say in what hardware is used and what type of energy generation is used to power it. There seem to have been more posts over the last couple years about running home media servers and getting away from subscription services; maybe something like that could be an alternative to what we have now.

The thing about owning is that it messes up the incentives. If the government owns something, it will be tempting to intervene if it loses value. And when he government needs money, they often sell at stupid prices. I think taxing makes more sense.

To paraphrase Margin Call, the pubic will soon be left holding the biggest bag of odorous Xcrement assembled in the history of IPOs.

We will all own half, just not the good half.

The quickest way to lose the AI battle to China and reinstate censorship and model political bias is to hand the industry over to the government. This doesn’t just benefit democrats, whatever political party is in power will use them as tools of political means. Not to mention almost certainly pricing won’t act in accordance with free market forces but instead be regulated. See healthcare.

This is more interesting than it looks, because it's using normal corporate control rather than regulation.

Obviously the current stakeholders hate losing control and wealth, but that's not the biggest issue.

Senator Sander's goal is not for some vast public to share the wealth, but for the government to have a veto on what gets done, to limit the collateral damage/exported costs. That's a classical government function.

However, the record of regulatory capture is nearly perfect, so it's likely the reverse would be achieved: the government-sponsored providers being a required intermediary in all knowledge work, with a corresponding incentive to seize those reins.

The probabilistic range of possibilities looks bleak: Now that all regulatory or quasi-governmental agencies of any import (Fed, FDA, EPA, Congress, Courts, CPB) have demonstrated remarkable plasticity to political whim, one would anticipate the worst would come of creating a political franchise out of fighting for control over AI; it would corrupt other aspects of politics.

This sounds like the new "thats people's retirement," because if we convert 50% of every AI company into a sovereign wealth fund (which is already a questionable seizure anyway), suddenly it will become politically untenable to do anything that might put that fund in danger, like... regulating anything, or even not bailing out a company thats struggling.

Instead of "The Public.." read it as "The Government Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies" because that's what it really means. It doesn't sound all that great now does it? Imagine what a red/blue administration would do with complete control of those AI capabilities.

If the public wants to own half of the AI company, then they should invest enough to buy half of it. Taking private property away without compensation is stealing. What the government did with Intel where they got 10% in stock was a bit better because Intel got money.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that AI is built without recompense on the work of all humanity, but anyone else think that's a lot of words to say "government backstop"? ;-)

Personally, I'm very bullish on AI but it's not so clear that the frontier labs have (so far) a business model that justifies their valuations. Having the government own a substantial stake in them sounds like it could set up some very perverse incentives.

Furthermore a significant ownership stake also comes with a degree of control, and we do not want any government to have that much control over what is going to be THE biggest influence vector in the history of humanity.

As long as they're non-voting shares, I don't see the harm.

I assume not enough politicians in this senator's camp were given their early cut so this is retribution/a lesson to the abstract "Big Tech" to show that DC is still the city that rules the world.

The public includes the rest of the world, not just a small minority living in the United States.

Better idea, mandate 4 days work week and 30 days PTO, the labor squeeze such law would cause will bring wages up and offsets AI productivity boost impact and pays people back in lifetime.

Under no conditions should the government own AI companies. The government has its hands in too many companies already. What needs to happen is stricter enforcement of copyright laws and intellectual property rights. In other words, AI training data should be curtailed substantially until such time as the companies are willing to pay for it. It's no different than the various other internet piracy issues, e.g., movies and music. Just more hype at the moment. That too will pass.

I am repulsed by this because it will obviously be the vehicle through which tax money will be directed into Altman & Co's pockets, but I also understand that they will get bailed out whether the government gets a share or not.

As long as they are voting shares, I don't see an increase in the harm. I'd like to see a legislative framework about how that ownership is handled that allows Congress and regulatory agencies to make decisions restricting how these companies will operate, but without any regard to the constitutional rights of the corporate persons or their owners.

I'm sick of the government arguing with monopolies, then taking dives. I want it to be abundantly clear that government has the ability to restrict these AI utility companies freely (such as their ability to feed on their customers), while still limiting the rights that the state has over the personal use of AI by private individuals. Partial state ownership will make that possible. Hell, let half their boards be publicly elected.

50% property tax is just seizure without compensation, which is generally considered human rights violation.

If government wants 50% of shares, it can just buy it (or expropriate it with compensation) and use its ability to get cheap long-term loans to finance it.

Bernard, this may not be the best time. This market is gonna go nuclear...

I strongly dislike the belief that people should be compensated when others find ingenious ways to profit off of publicly-available data.

We live in a world where "creating value" (doing things that others find helpful) and "capturing value" (getting those people to pay you money) are two different things. If I give my mom a hug, I'm creating value, but that's not necessarily something I'm going to charge her for it. Most value created by people won't ever be captured. And that's a good thing imo.

It keeps the world moving, removes friction, and allows for authenticity. There's nothing wrong with wanting to capture value, of course. But the second you do that, you're a business. And "capturing value" has a huge set of tasks and responsibilities you now have to handle.

But there's an intuition that has gradually built up over centuries, alongside the growth of "intellectual property" as a concept. It's best paraphrased as, "I want to be compensated for the value I create, without doing any of the work to capture it. And if someone else finds an ingenious way to capture some of the value that I've created, then they should pay me."

To some degree, I understand and agree with the sentiment.

Nothing is built in a vacuum. No person or company is an island. Everything is built on top of public infrastructure and works created by the country, laid by our forefathers. This is just one of many reasons why I believe in a progressive tax system. To the extent that you're able to capture large amounts of value in America, a lot of that is made possible by the infra you're building on top of, which is owned by the public, and a progressive tax system is a good way to to share that with the public.

(Of course, this has its own problems, bc the government collecting taxes is not enough, it has to spend those funds wisely, for the benefit of all. Which it obviously doesn't do, at the federal level, or at many state and city levels. So I've always found it a bit perplexing for people to clamor for more taxation while caring little about how tax revenues are spent. But that's a discussion for another time.)

But overall, I don't like this intuition, because it's essentially rent-seeking behavior.

Capturing value is hard. Simply creating value is not enough. If you write a song, or you build an app, or you cook a meal, you still have all your work ahead of you to find a customer/consumer, and understand what they find valuable enough to pay for, and ensure your offering matches that, and do the marketing/sales to get it in front of them, and convince them to pay, and scale to more people, and manage your books, and do all of this profitably.

Expecting to be paid for simply creating value but doing none of the work to capture the value to me feels a little bit entitled. Or, at the very least, naive.

What's interesting is that certain industries have more or less entitlement here, depending on the influence of "intellectual property" in that industry.

For example, there's almost no concept of intellectual property in the cooking. If you invent a new recipe, you can't really patent it and tell everybody else that they're not allowed to make it. So, pretty much every chef is okay with the fact that they need to actually capture value by opening a restaurant or going to work for one.

It's similar in the software industry, where rather than patenting all of our software and trying to enforce it, we generally do the opposite and release software in an open-source way. We're quite aware that if we want to profit, we'll need to start our own startup, and we have no qualms with that.

But with writing, music, etc., you see a lot more creators who want to just do the creation part, who don't want to do the business part, but who then want the profits that the business part enables.

I can empathize for sure, I get it. But I think a world with less rent-seeking behavior is better. A world where more people understand what it takes to capture value and are willing to do it (or happy to just not do it) is a better world. A world where more people feel entitled to the profits earned by those who are able to capture value, I think, is worse.

The thought I've toyed with was forcing public companies in some industries to issue some percentage of stocks to the government... And then using incentives to get them to pay dividends.

I'm sorry to say, but this is a losing position, as in one you only adopt when you've already lost and are trying to bargain. It presupposes that the AI companies are unregulateable, and that the only possible avenue of influence/dividend is through ownership. Contrast with the traditional idea that when companies create harm, the government works to stop that harm by default. Or that if these companies actually do succeed at rolling up up the distributed economy into a handful of centralized companies, the government steps in to tax their outsized gains to preserve some semblance of a distributed economy. Furthermore, what does said "ownership" actually do ? If the government is unable to regulate these companies, then it is also unable to reliably exercise a voting interest or insist on receiving dividends - if the companies are this powerful, then whoever actually controls them can always alter the terms and reject the "owners'" demands.

This would have a massive chilling effect on the private sector as a whole. IMO it would completely destroy investment in America. American companies and markets get extraordinary investor interest due to strong property rights. Once those rights are gone there will be massive capital flight and greatly reduced investment.

Imo this proposal is even worse than a billionaire wealth tax (which has all sorts of implementation issues).

Once they IPO, the public will in fact own much of them.

Fortunately this rslurration is further whining by people who can not. It's fun reading their impotent anger but, that's all it is.

Cool cool can we own half of all of the other industries that benefit from the commons? Oil, gas, gold,…?

I don’t have an opinion on this specific proposal, but I am glad to hear a politician talking about the effects of AI.

I feel like I’m going crazy sometimes. Over the next few years we will see the biggest change to employment our country has ever seen. Our entire financial structure is about to be upended, and not a single politician is talking about it. It’s so weird that all I think about is AI, yet not a single politician seems to notice. (Or maybe they do and that’s why they’re pillaging the country.)

Hackers should think of slavery reparations when they think of Sanders' proposal. Not as an equivalent, but as a more credible and similarly untenable idea. Sanders' being to take from those who produce to give to those who likely had almost no hand in the production, and with certainly no attempt to discern what contribution that may have been.

And by "the public" he means "the American public".

If I'm being entirely honest, I actually do not think that Donald Trump being de-facto CEO of OpenAI and Anthropic is a great idea. In fact, I do not think that Joe Biden being that is a great idea, but I definitely think we would have ruined this technology if we had Trump in charge of it. It's much better this way, where he expresses some power in his role as the government's chief executive and the founders of the AI companies comply in the way they do or resist in the way they do.

In addition, what would the public do with AI companies? They think that AI inference sucks up oceans of water. The same thing would happen here as happened to nuclear reactors after the NRC was made - it would take half a century before the first reactor approved after the NRC was set up to start up.

Grab Sears and JC Penney while you're in there.

Maybe the public should own half of everything.

"Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice." - Thomas Sowell

Between California and the federal government the public is already going to receive half the value of the equity in cash. The only question is will they buy back in ?

Yeah because collective ownership worked out so well for everything from Soviet cars to Venezuelan oil. Anyone speaking for "the people" is either an evil scumbag or a useful idiot for future ones. "People" are composed of individuals. Most individuals' content is nearly worthless for AI training (and some like Sanders' are probably harmful, they should own negative shares in this scheme:D).

Let individuals decide (including in the court of law like in those copyright lawsuits by those few that actually produce valuable content) how theirs is to be used.

I trust Anthropic, heck even Musk, more than I would trust some apparatchik legally empowered to decide for the "people".

"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." Gideon J. Tucker

Why does the public have a right to expropriate the property if AI companies specifically, as opposed to other types of companies? Just make broad rules that apply to everyone based on abstract principles. I’m fine even with very liberal economic approaches. If we want to raise corporate tax rates to 30%, fine, do that. Want to get creative? Half the equity of every company goes into a public fund. But this case by case, “sure is a nice company you got there” stuff is third-world shit.