Sanders: Government should break up OpenAI
thehill.com
thehill.com
Historically the most productive countries are the most prosperous - I think there is a big landscape of local maxima/minima in how healthy & happy a country/economy is, but shunning new technology has never been the path to Quality of Life. The only future where the US maintains its relative success involves American leadership in AI and robotics, with humans supporting them
I never understood this take. It strikes me more as "faith in our lord and savior AI" without actual evidence to support this.
Do you expect that to change, and if so, how?
The short answer: 1) Veto power vested in too many NIMBYs, in various flavors; and 2) Wall Street is rewarded on — and therefore chases — short-term results that goose the stock price.
America remains a massive manufacturer. China is bigger. But they’re approaching the same demographic constraints we did.
That, and the American economy's pernicious habit for making money doing nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization
When will that become problematic, you tell me...
How many years off is your pension, perchance? If you still think "technology" is going to bankroll your retirement, you've got more faith than I do.
> During the 18th century, the location served as a slave market and securities trading site... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street
kind of illustrates that.
But a primary problem is financial. There is too much financial wealth that is desperately looking to find lucrative opportunities which do not exist. So everybody follows the hype and creates the largest bubble we have seen in human history. And those who don't invest in AI, are largely bound in private equity or real estate, which extracts wealth from everybody without giving anything in return. This makes all other businesses less competitive.
It's a huge bottom-up scheme because the incentives are wrong, lacking transparency and unchecked financial power. This is simply not sustainable and nothing but a systemic change is needed.
In the lie for search of productivity, the west didn't become more efficient. We simply outsourced lower-margin industries to Asia and we are now faced with: Lost knowledge, lacking infrastructure, vulnerable supply chains and people without jobs.
AI cannot and will not change this.
Edit: Not sure why you got downvotes, I think it is a valid question.
"largest bubble we have seen in human history" - the sums involved are not the largest - the railway bubble was larger as percent of GDP. Also it's not even clear it is that much of a bubble - the AI may come through and produce more value than the sums invested. If you can double the workforce by matching humans with AI/robots how much is that worth?
There were also skid rows after industrialization in the US. Lots of people didn't make it out of them to the post ww2 jobs everyone thinks about when they say 'industrialization brought good jobs'.
There were also flop houses post industrialization, where you could rent yourself your own section of rope to lean on for the night.
But yep, after WW2 there were lots of jobs in the US. When did industrialization happen though? Why do we ignore all those that didn't make it out of skid row/flop houses and jump to an implied 1940s+ jobs market?
Hamstringing productivity and technology because of possible job loss - even loss of nearly all jobs, yes - just is not a sensible move. Moves certainly need to be made, but the best action is definitely not deindustrialization and degrowth and luddism. The dock worker unions demanding a ban on port automation is a microcosm of how we will slowly decay as a country.
Even the smart communists understand this. The goal should be wellbeing and prosperity and lack of scarcity for all. The end goal is not "ensure everyone can do these painstaking jobs which non-humans can do exponentially better and faster and cheaper". This is an artificial goal because of vague worries about "purpose". Yes, people need purpose, but placing objects onto locations or pressing buttons on a screen is not the pinnacle of what it means to be a sentient entity.
At any rate, this looks like they made a headline out of a passing comment. I wouldn't read too much into it.
Edit: lol at the AI bros downvoting facts.
The US has since gotten bad at dealing with companies like this. A company like Google or Amazon could/should be broken up into a few parts and would likely result in those parts together being worth more than when it was just the one company, and more competition in each industry.
Too early and the break-up can kill innovation. Too late and the company will have been a rent-seeking operation for so long that it chokes out dynamism.
It might be too early for OpenAI, but we shouldn't wait until they own all of the next Internet in the way Facebook, Google and Amazon ended up.
How do you apply that to the OpenAI case? You have to draw the rest of the owl here.
Killing or intentionally degrading a business can be legit public policy, but then just say that, don't pretend that the problem is that OpenAI is anticompetitive.
> It might be too early for OpenAI, but we shouldn't wait until they own all of the next Internet in the way Facebook, Google and Amazon ended up.
He wasn't proposing breaking it up as it is, which is what your comment assumes.
However, as I said in another comment, they do have other products (Sora and others in the pipeline that are meaningfully separate from their core product). I'd agree it's too early to break them up (at least by conventional anti-trust standards), and that if anything, they should be regulated on other dimensions.
If Bernie just wants to slow down automation then breaking up OpenAI is not the way to do it.
It's kind of like trying to preserve agricultural jobs by banning farm machinery. It's not the way to prosperity. People who would have dug potatoes become yoga instructors or web consultants or whatever.
Econ 101 is not the last word on economics
I've seen him say it will prevent landlord exploitation, but by definition - almost any pragmatic appliance of rent control will admit a goal of cheaper month-to-month rent. At present, a lot of rental properties have a monthly payment that are equal to - or sometimes more - than mortgage payments for similar* offerings in the same area.
It then follows logically that if rent control leads to cheaper rent, and a lot of rent costs are presently equal to or more than mortgage payments, then it makes renting affordability easier - and housing affordability is still innately more expensive. Rent control is a rent solution, and I guess it makes RENTAL of housing more affordable - which is good. But it's not a solution for the costs of buying houses.
https://www.cato.org/blog/folly-bernie-sanders-national-rent...
A lot? Where? You'd expect investors to be backing up the trucks for these properties if that were true.
Primary? For investors who know their stuff it is of significant interest. Prices are far more important (and house prices roughly follow demographics, so are dropping in many places)
- Tampa
- Chicago
- Detroit
- Houston
- Memphis
- Cleveland
- Birmingham
- New Orleans
- Pittsburgh
- Indianapolis
- Oklahoma City
Zillow’s September 2024 analysis shows these metros have $150–$450/month lower mortgage payments than rents when you assume 20% down, or 7% on an FHA.
OpenAI (optically) came out of nowhere and took over everything in a few years. A future company also could. We should punish violation of regulations and the law when it occurs. We don't need to be interfering just because we feel a company is too good at being a company.
If OpenAI violated anything with the recent non-profit stuff, sue or charge them.
Also it remains to be seen how long OpenAI will even survive. They are losing a ton of money and don't really have much of a moat.
Yes, monopoly power is worthwhile. It's abusing monopoly power which is illegal.
I don't see OpenAI abusing a monopoly. If Sanders is looking to the future and saying "they may do that one day", well, that's like saying someone might commit murder one day, so we should put them in jail now.
It doesn't work that way.
Just to be clear, I'm actually a fan of Bernie Sanders. Though, I'm not American, so it doesn't really matter.
I broadly consider myself left-wing but I think the libertarians are kind of right on that point.
Then they should be broken up too.
> We don't need to be interfering just because we feel a company is too good at being a company.
We absolutely do, because "being good at being a company" has become a sort of paperclip-maximizing game that is pretty well divorced from anything beneficial to society.
I doubt that that's true. In some cases at some companies, but I wouldn't be surprised if harm to society is per capita more likely at non-monopolies than at monopolies.
The law includes regulations around competition and monopoly which companies frequently violate, and the consequences can sometimes be as severe as getting "broken up".
I don't think Bernie's on to anything here, but competition law is good actually.
Really, what he's saying is "OpenAI should make and spend less money". The honest policy proposal there is to tax the bejeezus out of it.
But Sanders has, for reasons I don't really understand, gone all in on a modern antitrust branding around "oligarchy", so that all his statements about excessive corporate power have to be about restructuring companies, rather than exercising the full portfolio of powers the government has to influence the economy.
You saw something similar a few days ago from Elizabeth Warren, who reacted to the UE1 outage by saying we should break up AWS. Not Amazon: AWS. Like, RDS and S3 should be different companies. That's not real; whether or not she understood what she was saying, she didn't mean it. What she means is she doesn't like huge corporations (fair enough).
It's annoying to have to read between the lines on these people, but I guess that's always been politics.
What even is this as a platform? Yes, wealth inequality is bad, but what exactly does this do to solve it...?
"Liberals are struggling" "this as a platform" if you try to conclude what the "platform" is from Sanders' opinions you'll be quite far from the truth.
That normal liberals are so deeply associated with his ilk by the national electorate to the point Harris was considered more radical than Trump is a whole can of worms in itself.
Tech ludditism is the death drive externalized. Andrew Yang is all we have left for a pro tech left wing - and #Math isn’t going to win elections.
"We should cripple our strongest AI Company" translates into "We will be subservient to foreign companies".
Just look at how the collapsed British Empire is trying to enforce its nonsensical censorship laws on American companies with no success.
Good luck getting DeepSeek to do what you want. See iRobot for an example of this American self-flagellation by the elderly in action.
Perhaps it would look like this -- if you replace a worker with AI then you must still pay minimum wage straight into a public benefit tax.