If the markets reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US should nationalize them

15 hours ago by muelltonne to c/technology

From space to telecommunications, the US has a long history of fostering technology for the public good. These AI models could be aligned to democratic values, not corporate profits
wuffah 95 points 14 hours ago

This is otherwise known as a TAXPAYER FUNDED BAILOUT. Socialize the loss, privatize the gain.

Let them burn in the fire they set.

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scrubbles 17 points 13 hours ago

No, a bailout would be that they get a big payday to continue as normal. Nationalization would mean the government takes control and it becomes part of the government.

Airlines were a bailout. Amtrak was nationalized.

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Venator 3 points 7 hours ago

It can function a bit like a bail out if the investors know they'll get a better than market rate when it's nationalised, but yeah they still shouldn't be conflated without reason.

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limer -32 points 14 hours ago

They are too big to not be bailed out; the loss absolutely will be a millstone around the budget for over a generation. This will cause a lot of suffering and make the rich richer and the majority of us much poorer

Edit: I was predicting what would happen, not what should happen. It’s very easy to state what the corrupted government will do. I in no way support what is surly inevitable by the wicked ones

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db2 25 points 13 hours ago

They didn't even exist a few years ago. They can get fucked.

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evilcultist 24 points 13 hours ago

So raise the fucking taxes on the rich already.

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porous_grey_matter 14 points 13 hours ago

They don't have a viable business, bailing them out would be the real millstone around the neck of the economy, it would be a bottomless pit to throw money into.

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cAUzapNEAGLb 6 points 13 hours ago

Nothing is too big to fail

Is a balloon ever too big to pop?

No, let it pop, let it burn, let it rot, and lets learn the lesson this time

We must accept our consequences so that we can finally actually move foward

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Semi_Hemi_Demigod 4 points 13 hours ago

A forest needs fire to clear out undergrowth or the fire will be even bigger and more damaging next year.

Markets are the same. Either we let them die now or we have even worse problems when they die later.

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gravitas_deficiency 3 points 13 hours ago

Burn it down.

Eat the rich.

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humanspiral 2 points 8 hours ago

That only applies to spaceX saps who bought after IPO fraud. The big owners of the 2 LLM companies are Google and Amazon. They can break even on their datacenters because just their stakes will probably reach $1T before saps get to hold the bag.

Failure can just mean that they need to slow down from the absurd expansion commitments. Saying there must be a bailout is saying that there needs to be 3x more datacenters by tuesday, even if fraud is behind that push. "We need to maintain the fraud for longer" means we need to make the bubble even larger so that bailing out the fraudsters when it pops seems bigger economic impact.

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brucethemoose 0 points 13 hours ago

Doesn't matter; they're never going to be profitable. That's not the direction the field is headed.

So we can deal with it now. Or later, when things are worse.

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wuffah -1 points 11 hours ago

I would expect the Marxist-Leninist recommendation would be for such an institution to be founded by the state, and owned by the workers that created it. Instead, this would be a capitalist government using taxes on what little wealth the workers in a capitalist system have to sustain a failing business created by capital.

Why would an ML user support a capitalist bailout? Unless of course… the capitalism is coming from inside the Marxist-Leninist house! Ahhhhhhh!!

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Goldholz 56 points 15 hours ago

...what? No?

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just_another_person 33 points 15 hours ago

And saddle them with the debt. Fuck the investors and the cyclical scam machine. They should forfeit that money outright.

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mrmaplebar 28 points 14 hours ago

Absolutely fucking not.

Nationalizing AI companies represents nothing more than a big tech bailout, leaving the American taxpayers holding the bag for the grandiose excesses, industrialized IP theft, and borderline fraudulence of some of the richest and most powerful corporations in modern society.

Hell no. No bailout for big AI.

They stole everything they have from the people, and if they are too stupid to figure out how to turn unprecedented plagiarism on a global scale into a viable business plan, then they deserve nothing more than to fail outright.

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JasonDJ 3 points 13 hours ago

if they are too stupid to figure out how to turn unprecedented plagiarism on a global scale into a viable business plan,

Have they tried asking the LLM to generate one?

"Claude, justify your existence in the form of a well-written business plan for a mult-billion dollar company"

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village604 1 point 12 hours ago

How is the government seizing control of a company and its assets a bailout?

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mrmaplebar 4 points 11 hours ago

Because these "assets" are at best hemorrhaging billions of dollars per year, and are also the result of total cultural strip mining. Why would I, as a taxpayer, want to take over a massive, and massively unprofitable business?

I think it's naive to believe that the government will seize these companies without without a huge amount of taxpayer cash winding up in the hands of big tech companies and their owners.

Let failing businesses fail. Leave the taxpayers out of it

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andyburke 21 points 14 hours ago

NO.

WHAT THE FUCK, BRUCE?

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Washedupcynic 20 points 12 hours ago

Fuck that. My tax dollars will not be funding corporate bail outs.

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Canconda 17 points 14 hours ago

All this bubble pumping bullshit is a desperate attempt to maintain their AI monopoly.

The reality is most tasks AI is actually useful for do not require >75% of the full AI model to do said tasks well.

This is why they're also trying to monopolize computing power. Because once people realize they can run AI locally without a gaming PC these digital snake oil salesmen are fubar.

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village604 3 points 12 hours ago

They will also want us all to subscribe to their virtual desktops instead of owning our computers.

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Canconda 3 points 12 hours ago

The electricity, the data, and the device, all on a subscription plan.

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Asafum 14 points 14 hours ago

I think that no matter what happens we're going to foot the bill. There's no way in hell these assholes will ever face consequences of any sort. They already destroyed consumer electronics markets, and will bring the rest of the economy down with them if they fail, but they themselves and the parasite investors will never lose. We'll have to pay...

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snooggums 10 points 14 hours ago

If we are going to suffer anyway just shut them down permanently so we aren't paying for their society ruining bullshit.

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brucethemoose 12 points 13 hours ago

Absolutely fucking not.

I'm not coming from the "AI hater" angle either. I love open models.

But OpenAI and Anthropic are abominations. I've watched good startups and research groups disappear into the gaping maw they've created, all reason go out the window, replaced by whatever lies are coming out of Altman and Modi's mouths.

...They're destroying US innovation, and sucking everything into a black hole.

They need to burn.

And its honestly insane someone like Schneier can't see this, or was just paid to say this. No one in the machine learning research space likes OpenAI; they never have. I guess he's old enough to use past nationalization efforts as a baseline, in his mind?

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eleijeep 6 points 14 hours ago

And here in the newspaper factory is where we manufacture the consent.

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humanspiral 5 points 8 hours ago

If it sounds dumb, it's because it's meant to. "Buy them if they fail" debate leads to more onerous alternative proposals. The US is on a mission to make Skynet for Israel or China wins. It's hard for them to fail when Skynet will pay high prices for their datacenter time. But if they fail, it will be because they are too expensive, and "American people" owning them doesn't pay American people anything if they are stuck losing money forever. And the other alternatives that stem from debate, is "why not just throw government money at bubble top rates?"

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diocesegoldmine 5 points 14 hours ago

From space to telecommunications, the US has a long history of fostering technology for the public good.

This one sentence alone is enough to dismiss the entire knob-slobbering article in my eyes.

Edit: A word.

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expr 4 points 8 hours ago

What the actual fuck, Guardian.

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NaibofTabr 4 points 15 hours ago

Eh, maybe buy the assets after they file for bankruptcy. Better to do it at the state level than federal though. I'm sure there are several state governments that could use a server hardware upgrade.

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desmosthenes 4 points 14 hours ago

let them die, others will rise from the ashes that don’t require burning the world down to grow

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gravitas_deficiency 4 points 13 hours ago

That is so unbelievably pants-on-head fucking stupid that it’s difficult to even comprehend.

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lIlIlIlIlIlIl 4 points 14 hours ago

here’s how hard I hit the “ef” on that “fuck no”:

F

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JasonDJ 2 points 13 hours ago

Respect.

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pelya 3 points 14 hours ago

Each investor will get one CD of ChatGPT training data per share as a bankruptcy settlement. Every CD need to be inserted into a single user-provided server to train the model anew, because it's saved as a multipart archive.

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bedwyr 3 points 8 hours ago

What? No. You want the government to be in control of this tech directly? Jesus Christ, I can't tell which is worse, our situation now, or if we nationalized it and the goddamned federal government was calling the shots directly.

We should seize control of them by legal process and explode them with due process in law and all that shit.

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iceberg314 3 points 14 hours ago

They should force them to open source their models, datasets, and research

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mrmaplebar 4 points 14 hours ago

How can they "open source" other people's work?

The data that they've trained on wasn't theirs to begin with.

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scrubbles 1 point 13 hours ago

ITT, people who don't realized nationalization != bailout.

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fruitycoder 3 points 12 hours ago

Tbf most US nationalization schemes are just bailouts. The car manufactures just had stocks purchased. Intel too.

There is little appetite from corpo Dems and of course any Republicans for a forced seizing of assets.

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brucethemoose 1 point 12 hours ago

IMO the distinction doesn’t matter, as even the remnants of these companies are radioactive.

I don’t mean that from an anti-AI angle, either. The people involved in them are sucking innovation into a black hole, on purpose. They’ve politicized AI by enshittifying it so quickly, without an ounce of shame. There is nothing to gain by seizing and nationalizing OpenAI/Anthropic, even if we miraculously stop a “bailout” and get rid of the leadership cleanly.

Better to put what they have in the open and start over with a new entity.

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shortwavesurfer 0 points 9 hours ago

I like this idea. Let the government print tons of money and buy these companies, and while they're doing that, my net worth will go up since I hold my net worth in Monero and not Fiat.

Edit: Maybe this will teach people that the government doesn't care about you and that the only safe thing to hold is something they can't print out of thin air.

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