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Comment by inerte | Hacker News Reader

That's like every government initiative. Same as healthcare? School? I mean if you don't have children why do you pay taxes... and roads if you don't drive? I mean the examples are so many... why do you bring this argument that if it doesn't benefit you directly right now today, it shouldn't be done?

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There are arguments aplenty that schooling and a minimum amount of healthcare are public goods, as are roads built on public land (the government owns most roads after all).

What is the justification for considering data centers capable of running LLMs to be a public good?

There are many counter examples of things many people use but are still private. Clothing stores, restaurants and grocery stores, farms, home appliance factories, cell phone factories, laundromats and more.

a distinction: the data centers have become the means of production, unlike clothing from a store

How is that distinct from any of my other examples which listed factories? Very few factories in the US are publicly owned; citing data centers as places of production merely furthers the argument that they should remain private.

Libraries with books are likely considered public goods right?

Why not an LLM datacenter if it also offers information? You could say it's the public library of the future maybe.

Not all libraries are publicly owned or accessible. Most are run by local municipalities because they wouldn't exist otherwise.

Data centers clearly can exist without being owned by the public.

So can bookstores.

Healthcare, schools, roads, generative AI. One of these things is not like the others.

We gave incentives to broadband, why not generative AI?

Last-mile services like roads, electricity, water, and telecommunications are natural monopolies. Normal market forces fail somewhat and you want some government involvement to keep it running smoothly.

This is not at all true of generative AI.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted because you're right. The entire point of taxation is to spread the cost among everyone, and since everyone doesn't utilise every government service every tax payer ends up paying for stuff they don't use. That like, the whole point...

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