AI Fortunes Are Reviving an Old Debate About Private Power
ai-updates.net
ai-updates.net
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
We're not talking about widows with a pension who are just interested in dividends. This isn't some utility.
And many companies give out RSUs which act like shares even if they're not.
The reality is that startups ARE worker owned.
It's the old, unionized companies that aren't-- although many are embracing options and RSUs.
Sweetie, it is called cooperative, not startup.
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.
But the reality is that startups workers usually have shares and the shares make them owners. Whether they benefit or not from the ownership isn't the question here.
All you need to do is look at some union-run cooperatives that fail to understand that "worker owned" is not magic.
Do you think that some magical worker-owned cooperative would let people sell? No way. I know folks that worked at a vegan restaurant cooperative. They wanted to get another job-- but the cooperative wouldn't give them anything. Why? If they weren't working each night, they weren't going to get a percentage of the business they built.
There are good reasons for lockups and, of course, you don't need to take the job.
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).
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.
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.
cuba has a longer life expectancy than the US despite all of that btw
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
A progressive tax would, no? You could explicitly tax larger entities more.
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.
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).
Then you get three corporations that each own a one third stake in all the things that constitute Alphabet and a variety of investment instruments that allow anyone to buy shares in all three of them at the same time.
Things like that wouldn't work if they had an actual individual majority shareholder, but the larger the company is the less likely that's the case.
> The idea is that you wouldn't need to government to actively break up companies, they'd do it themselves (or get outcompeted).
And then we're back to the original point -- business expenses are deductions so raising the tax rate actually gives them the incentive to spend money expanding rather than using it to pay dividends, so if anything it does the opposite of that.