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Stocks cannot be negative. I get the hate surrounding AI companies, but the resistance to this idea makes no sense to me.
In my opinion the number should be closer to 50% instead of 5% - but in both cases if AI companies are the biggest bubble in the world and go bankrupt then the government is left with a $0 value stock they didn't give any money for...
If ai companies don't go bankrupt then any returns they do generate go to the government which can be used to provide public services and offset the average Americans tax bill, thus passing any potential gains from ai to the people who generated the training data for them in the first place.
There are no gains. Ownership equates to subsidies. Why are you taking the value of the stock as an asset? If you aren't going to flip it on the open market which the government 100% is not then it doesn't matter what the price is. Uncle Sam doesn't need a fucking HLOC
This is true but you also have to ask what OpenAI is getting out of this deal. They're not just going to give away stock for nothing, and the US government doesn't have a policy of helping itself to portions of companies.
So OpenAI thinks it's getting something for this. Whatever that is, it's bribing the government to get.
I agree this level of scrutiny should be applied to the situation, but there is a growing sentiment of the government stepping in to take returns from AI, Bernie Sanders asked for it (where I got the 50% from) and many other countries have this exact model. Hell Alaska has this model for oil already.
It could be what openai is hoping to get out of this is only needing to give up 5% instead of a much larger number and be able to look like a good guy giving back.
I'm open to hearing what a theory is that openai is trying to bribe the government with but I'd say my explanation is more plausible than an unknown backdoor deal.
I think at this point it's speculation. Your speculation is a reasonable one. But with Trump, I think there's another very reasonable one: he's a natural fascist so they're just trying to buy a future unspecified favour. Maybe it'll be to avoid having to give up a bigger stake in the future, or to avoid a big tax, but they probably don't know exactly. I'd compare it to all the techbros donating to Trump's campaign and turning up to his inauguration - they don't know exactly what they're getting out of that deal, but they know they'd rather pay homage to the king than be on his shit list.
So to me this is evidence of corruption, even without a known deal having taken place. They know that Trump plays favourites with the enormous power he wields, so they want to be the favourite.
Agreed 100% we are both speculating at motives. So if we set that aside the question then becomes would it be better for institutional shareholders to have this 5% or for a wealth fund like the Alaska permanent fund to have it.
Even in a case of this being about bribing the trump admin it would result in all future administrations having access to this as well. This would require a bill in Congress to implement so I say support it and look at the bill to see if there is a way that trump or someone else can abuse it, then we can get out the pitchforks
Oh, I don't think it should be opposed, I just think it should be viewed with deep suspicion.
I just don't think governments should be in the business of burning down our planet just to make it easier for some techbros to not do their own work.
The contribution of AI to greenhouse emissions is tiny compared to the actually significant contributors - like transportation and rearing animals.
And with that 90% of people have stopped reading and thing I'm an AI booster so congrats for still being here.
I also think the utility isn't going to be for techbros primarily. Software developers can already do the things that LLMs are good at, and are better than LLMs in important areas. But think about writing a 500-line script to extract data from a database and do some simple data analysis on it, then displaying it. Software developers, again, can do that easily (it'd probably take a few hours - more if it's more complex or if they polish it).
But most people cannot. Yet there are a lot of situations in business or in government which could benefit from being able to say, "show me the average of (X) over the last 10 years, stratified by variables A, B, C." And AI will do write a script to do it (so the actual computation is not done with unreliable bullshit) with ease. The script will have way too many comments, may well be laid out in a nonsensical way, and may reinvent the wheel stupidly, but in my limited experience of asking the LLM we have at work to do things like this for giggles and because I'm not paying for tokens, it will do it correctly.
I'm not saying to buy the hype, but if you think it's useless for everything but "making it easier for some techbros" you're just as immune to evidence as the hypesters are.
Transportation and rearing animals have a practical use and yield returns unlike ai. Also the projected energy usage for ai on the long term these shitty companies sre olanning go way beyond what they have today.
I literally described a situation in which AI has a practical use. If you're going to disagree, fine - but at least acknowledge where the disagreement is instead of replying without (apparently) having read my comment.
I believe I read somewhere that AI capacity and hence potential usage is going up about 12% per year. That could turn out to be a lot but it would have to go on for a long time to end up significant compared to the actually large polluters.
AI energy usage for a single person is (very roughly) comparable to having the TV on or playing a video game on a high spec PC. Even if the only benefit it gives anyone is the same mild pleasure you get from watching TV, we accept that using energy for these purposes is worthwhile. So, despite this topic recurring constantly, no-one has given a sensible reason why we should particularly call out AI for its energy usage.
Of course, there's a readily available explanation for why people do it: people hate it with an irrational passion. So they criticise all aspects of it, whether reasonably or not.
I think this is a much better argument than the bailout ones I see in this thread, but I still disagree.
If the tech bros are going to have easier jobs then the tech giants who employ them will become richer. I want the american people to see some of that enrichment that they themselves produced by generating a portion of the training data.
If ai is going to burn down the planet then the person I want on the board to help with decision making is the government. They will be a force to say no we will only use renewables, or that we have to source water sustainably, etc.
The government does not have a profit motive, if they did taxes would be maximized, and while the government's motive isn't exactly pure at least it is somewhat influenced by the people through democracy.
If the only alternative is ai companies doing whatever they want then this is way better. If your alternative is shut down ai companies I don't think that's possible, the cat is out of the bag, this genie can't be put back in the bottle.
If the plausible bullshit generators don't go bankrupt then the money goes straight into the military industrial complex making life for millions of brown people markedly worse, while the American people still get shit health care, low wages, and measurably low quality of life.
The only people here who stand to benefit are the already rich.
I don't like the military industrial complex, and sure this money will help fund that technically because money is fungible. But I want to expand government programs like social security and Medicare, and I'd love for an administration that also wants to do that to have openai's returns to fuel it.
Does it not seem likely that either if the value of their stake goes down they would throw money at it to keep it worth something or make it potentially worth more? They threw money at GM and Chrysler not that long ago. And even if the share of OpenAI remains stable or increases, the costs to circumvent damage done by the existence and expansion of data centers is still going on, which would also cost taxpayer money. And what do the public get for this? It feels like funneling more public money into private hands while further destroying our environment for something that so far has been of questionable benefit to a large portion of society.
No it doesn't seem likely that the government would do that. The government collected more than $5 trillion last year in taxes. If the government wants to get more money they are incentivized to make the whole us economy more efficient, not prop up failing investments that would lead to the detriment of the rest of its revenue sources.
They propped up gm and chrystler because the auto industry collapsing would have sent shockwaves through the whole economy. I'm not saying I agree with what they did, but it wasn't for a return on stocks.
The key thing here is this is funneling PRIVATE Monet into PUBLIC hands, we need more of this!
AI is just hot air ballon ,it flys to the sky , and implode .