danny_codes

So, your argument is that badly implemented wealth taxes lead to capital flight?

Sure, we all agree.

The solution is pretty obvious, just implement a wealth tax that prevents capital flight.

It’s not that hard. The US already taxes its citizens abroad. A well-implemented wealth tax would be charged regardless of where you live or where your money is. If you are a US citizen you get taxed. Then you slap an exit tax on citizenship revocation and you’re good to go.

Not hard, simple, we already have systems in place to enforce it.

Pathetic. US leadership is trash right now. It’s like a bunch of 3 year olds. Unbelievable.

> It's that we can never allow this technology to advance outside of trusted labs.

Impossible. In 10 years you'll be able to train today's models for ~$10M from Moore's law and training innovation. In 20 years it'll be ~$200k. The genie won't go back in the bottle.

100%. American capitalism is broken. So far that illness has given us Trump. So bad, but apparently not a catastrophe (yet). I wonder what comes next (assuming we don't fix it)..

As compute prices fall it gets easier and easier to make "frontier" models. So it's inevitable that commodity, open source models of equivalent capacity to today's "frontier" models will be available to the public. Remember this is just weights, anyone can download them and run it whenever they like. The only constraint is compute.

Counterpoint, who cares?

Markets will simply adjust and financial services will arise to smooth instances where liquidation is problematic.

The status quo shifts to optimize once taxes change. Our system will do the same.

I don’t understand why people don’t think it through all the way to the next equilibrium

Plenty of contracts end up being unenforceable.If people think they have a strong case for breaking a contract, they are welcome to do so and see if a judge or jury agrees.

I think it’s laughable to think OpenAI has some special sauce that can’t be replicated easily. They simply have asymmetric access to compute and the dollars to power it. Thats the only moat here.

OpenAI doesn’t even know how their model works. Nobody knows how LLMs work. So it’s not like it’s technically difficult to replicate, just costly.

How can we prove intent? I’m sure a clever actor can disguise their prompt and simply claim the LLM suggested such and such on its own.

It’s not like Anthropic or OpenAI have the faintest idea how their models actually work.

Obviously lab just means company. They use it because it confuses the public into thinking they are doing research primarily. Which of course is nonsense.

Of course, just your normal 10000% return. Pretty typical I’m sure that’s very accurate.

Ofc. This announcement is in all likelihood a calculated pr play to create some regulatory moat, because internal progress is likely stalling out

A machine that exhibits behavior akin to human intelligence. OPs analogy is accurate.

OFC, YC is in the business of making money and simply doesn’t care or consider ethics whatsoever. They just don’t care.

But this is pretty standard for this class of people. To get super rich you have to fuck people over, there’s simply no way to amass a billion ethically.

Isn’t that exactly the problem pointed out on the article? In an attempt to make driving more affordable, the state causes the victims of drivers to pay for their own victimization. Par the course for a CA law but still.

As a side n ote,curious if people have takes on why CA creates so many objectively garbage laws.

I disagree, it’s about computers.

The risk is that we lose control. This has been a staple of SciFi since forever. This guy has apparently seen enough that he thinks that’s a viable threat

Rich people have more capacity to do harm. For example that dude Luigi killed was a mass murderer, he killed 1000s, maybe 10,000s of people. So it’s hard for a poor criminal to compete

Why don’t your customers find you? Assuming you have what they want.

I suppose depends how broadly “ad” is taken to be. Is a webpage an ad? Presumably no if it’s your landing page.

OP is presumably talking about invasive ads that try to take the attention of people who aren’t looking for the product in question

Piketty's proposal is a wealth tax. That's the subject of my previous post.

I agree income taxes are progressive. Tt's just that very wealthy people don't pay them by virtue of not having any taxable income (they of course have tremendously large incomes, but our tax code doesn't consider their income taxable).

Thus our tax system effectively falls off at the top end: the overall tax burden decreases after say $50-100M and continues to fall from there. If you are really wealthy you can entirely avoid income tax rather easily, as Trump and Bezos demonstrate for us quite regularly.

The point is that income tax's progressivity is ineffective when your richest people don't have income, which is why you need a wealth tax to fill the gap.

The Piketty proposal I mentioned is designed to target this tax specifically at the gap: that is, people will very large amounts of wealth.

Regulatory capture is always an option, true. Certainly seems to be the favored direction of the current administration.

And who is lobbying the government to keep it that way?

Probably Amazon let's be real here

We let the university model degrade, and now this author is pontificating about how the university model isn't working.

Yes.

Because we let it degrade.

Does collusion require privacy? You can collude in public if you want.

I mean I'm talking about a specific policy proposal, for which people have done the analysis. Piketty has several books on the subject you can read. The tax structure is simply designed to make taxes progressive for all income groups, instead of progressive up until upper middle class and then highly regressive.

I can't imagine anyone is supportive of an upper-middle income earner having a 50% tax rate and a super wealthy billionaire paying 5%.

Or are you in favor of a regressive tax code, where richer people pay less tax? If so, I'm curious why you believe we should structure society that way.

Not sure what to make of your Marx rant. I never mentioned Marxism so I'm not sure what you're referring to.

Or reform your legal system? I mean it's clearly not working very well, time for a change.

Bro is delusional. The only reason there aren't 45 LLM competitors is compute costs. Once costs fall the tech will commoditize.

It is interesting that a role like "Head of Strategic Futures" both exists and attracts insane people.

Or rather, unsurprising response. Obviously everyone is going to cheer when what's his face gets killed. I mean how many 100,000s of people can your company murder before you get off'd by one of the survivors.

> In most rich countries, the % of income people pay already goes up with income.

Right. But rich people don't have income, so they don't pay any taxes. Our tax code is not progressive at the top. It is progressive for income at the top, but income != accumulation of wealth in a year. Bezos can make $10B in a year and pay $0 tax. In fact he has done literally that for many years. Under the current tax code, he can effectively actually never pay taxes ever.

So at the very least we should have a progressive tax code for everyone. I think that's not controversial?

As for trying to rebalance wealth, that's a broader discussion. It's pretty clear though that the current system will continue to concentrate wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people, until the general population either rebels or becomes effectively peasants. I mean if the growth rate is 2% and capital returns 5% a year.. eventually you're going to get all the assets concentrated in the 0.0001%.

Piketty's tax goes into effect only for wealth greater than a certain amount. The goal is to target people who are paying insufficient income tax, because they are so wealthy they can avoid having taxable income. So we'd start the tax at assets over $20-100M.

Normal people are completely unaffected by such a tax, since they already pay a high effective tax rate on their income (normal people generally cannot avoid income tax like the wealthy can).

I didn't follow your argument about offshoring, since a wealth tax taxes all wealth regardless of it's location.

So unless your parents left you a $20M mansion this is irrelevant

I mean that's the entire point of structuring your taxes so they are unavoidable. Piketty's proposal of a 2% wealth tax floor on wealth over $100M is a great way to solve that problem.

I'm not sure why thousands of middle class people would "bear the burden", since by definition they are far too poor to be effected by a wealth tax.