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Comment by godwinson__4-8 | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the response but I think you need to read what I wrote again.

I don't think I'm arguing with a "phantom" at all, rather you seem to suggest I want OpenAI to own the economy when I rather precisely articulated the most desirable "rug pull" (using a phrase you yourself invoked elsewhere in this discussion) would be depriving them of that very opportunity. If anyone has misread this, I would suggest it's you. We simply seem to disagree on the timing and nature of the regulatory intervention.

Are you against UBI? We've gone back and forth with each other for a bit now and I still don't have an answer to that question.

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I have read your posts closely. If I misunderstand them I am open to being corrected. So here is what I take from them. I don’t think you are advocating for OpenAI to be a monopoly. I think you assume that it’s inevitable that someone will. And the only solution is to nationalize them and then use the proceeds to fund UBI.

Is that accurate and complete? If not, what am I missing?

Btw you didn’t ask me for my opinion on UBI, you declared your opinion as a statement or at most a rhetorical question not something that warranted a response. That might not be what you intended but reread your sentence and ask if someone would interpret it as a question rather than a statement.

I am not opposed to UBI or nationalizing AI, and I am not defending a managerial or ownership class. I am arguing that there is an intermediate step available to prevent the emergence of a monopoly that is fully vertically integrated with custom chips —> training —> inference —> application—> deployment.

Society doesnt need to allow that. We can limit OpenAI and anthropics ability to build the app layer. We could limit their share of compute to a percentage of available compute and make the remaining share available to other competitors. We could require that they distribute their training data to others after some period of time. We could require they release their weights.

There are a broad set of tools available to ensure that don’t capture the whole intelligence stack and then expand horizontally to, as you said, make it so “my business doesn’t exist in 10 years”. The fact that you don’t know my business but could credibly predict that they could put most businesses out of existence is a massive problem that UBI won’t fix.

I don’t want to live in a society where humanity is living on the patronage of monopoly AI. And AI won’t be viable if no one has money because they greedily expand everywhere and put people out of work and businesses out of existence.

I think there are intermediate solutions before UBI and full nationalization are needed and we should implement them. Specifically, making sure vertical integration isn’t allowed, making sure compute access is broadly distributed rather than let openAI and anthropic lock it all up, making sure training data sets must be released within a short time frame like we do with patents, making sure the labs can’t copy customers.

You mostly have it right. I appreciate the response.

Now it is my turn to make sure I understand what you are saying. On that count, I think there is a remaining point where we are not understanding each other. And really the rest of the discussion hinges on this.

You say:

> I am not defending a managerial or ownership class.

But also say:

> I have talked to over 10 people at universities, SMBs, and large enterprises that are actively allocating millions of dollars to bring AI in house.

Who are these people with such authority if not the managerial or ownership class, or at the very least, their representatives?

I think what you are saying is quite plainly a defense of such interests. We sort of need to agree on that or the rest of the discussion cannot follow.

Once we align on that, I will have more to say which I believe will close the loop I have been attempting to weave.

I have been enjoying this back and forth though. Some of your points do make sense. Perhaps you are even correct. But let's be accurate about the nature of the two options we each propose, only then can we attempt to grasp some sense of the tradeoffs.

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