Listen up AI nerds: here’s the deal.
We need you to give 50% of your companies to the government and then pay a 50% unrealized capital gains tax on the rest. And then a 37% Federal Tax and a 13.3% California tax. And tip 30%.
And don’t let any of this affect your growth rates or shut your companies down.
We’ll need more money next year.
We’re spending $80B repaving the parking lots of every Learing Center in the country.
Greater good.
there's an easier and better way to achieve Bernie's objectives to collectivize ownership of AI.
buying or seizing AI lab equity won't work.
- buying: the taxpayer is paying a wildly marked up rate in the trillions and will be perceived as a bailout
- seizing: do I even have to explain why this is a bad idea?
giving the government 50% of the equity in the leading AI labs creates an incentive to crystallize them as the forever winners. a sovereign AI fund will want to protect its rents and will dramatically reduce competition in the sector through regulation. this is a very bad idea.
so how to share the wealth? (if you had to)
a government-run initiative to distill frontier models into open source models.
the American consumer can then use frontier models for the commodity cost of the inference. a large share of the OAI/Anthropic margin gets handed directly to the consumer in the form of a surplus. no tricky accounting of who deserves what. no weird airdrops. consumers of AI benefit in proportion to their usage.
right now, China is sort of doing this, but they are slowing down because open source models don't monetize well, if at all. so there is actually a case to be made for the government to underwrite the creation of such a product, since it is a public good.
Bernie's own stated objectives aren't met by an AI sovereign wealth fund.
if he wants to break oligarchic control as he claims, a 50% state ownership guarantees a durable oligarchy rather than busting it. distillation does the opposite by collapsing the moat and pricing power of leading AI labs. his goals also contradict themselves. reducing concentration trades off against creating an endowment for the US taxpayer. if he wants to maximize the value of the fund, that means ensuring that OAI/Anthropic/etc do well.
Q: won't distillation destroy competitiveness of leading labs?
A: it already happens, and they are still competitive. people will still pay for bleeding edge models while using trailing open source ones. but if the labs threaten to take over the economy, you could make the case that some of their margin should be stripped away
Q: would the major labs continue to train new models if the government was funding open source clones?
A: if we reach a situation where it becomes politically necessary to reduce AI lab power, they can afford to take a little more time in between models.
**the above is a thought experiment, not a policy suggestion**
while I am not advocating for state control over AI, if it does become the case that there is a massive populist backlash to power concentrating with the AI labs (let's say OAI/Anthropic each become $10- 20T companies), and something _must_ be done about them, a government-sponsored open source approach would be more efficient and beneficial to the average American than nationalizing the labs.
For Bernie and his fellow travelers, whenever a novel technology appears, the repertoire of responses is astonishingly limited: obstruct it, regulate it into irrelevance, or nationalize it. What is conspicuously absent is any sustained effort to address the technology’s actual externalities while preserving its benefits. But when one’s toolkit consists entirely of a red hammer and sickle, every innovation begins to look like a field awaiting collectivization
@BAYC5511@ASvanevik I don’t need an article to understand taxing to gain ownership and providing money to gain ownership. As a side note, not a fan of either from the government! But to not understand the difference is cognitive dissonance at its finest
@CharlesTXPolicy The middle school near us has no concerns for kids who run away from the school all day long and wander around the city before returning to the campus to get picked up by mom and dad. School cop told me he doesn’t even know why parents bring their children to school there