Engineering their bailout in advance.
Have some… For free… You’ll like it.
AKA “We don’t want to be stuck holding the bag”
Yeah, I can’t wait until I have to foot the bill for another (completely predictable and avoidable) bail out.
Not really passing the bag when you give it away. If they were selling it to the gov, then sure.
How does that make a difference?
If the US government owns part of it when the bubble pops, then they’ll say they need to be bailed out. Why does it matter how they got it?
I’m just disagreeing that’s not passing the bag. Because the government doesn’t lose anything because they haven’t paid anything. They’re not on the hook for anything owed.
The other points I somewhat agree. On the bailout point I think any bailout that they would need in the future would exceed the value of the 5% and anyone stupid or compromised enough to go for that would have done it without the 5% anyway.
What it could do is sway regulation that would favor OpenAI. Or bolster public opinions since OpenAI can say the government and therefore the people have a vested interest in X Y Z.
The best thing would be to dump the stock ASAP and put it into the deficit or public programs but this administration isn’t going to do that.
They should let these clowns fall on their faces and not subsidize them.
We all knew it was coming, it was just a question of how.
Fuck this
lol Bernie was talking about 50% and their counter is apparently 5%. What’s say we meet in the middle with… oh, 55%? (math by ChatGPT)
It’s a bad investment. Not an investment at all. Wait until they shit the bed, destroy the economy, and seizse the assets.
There is no “investing”, they stole the IP so they owe the People a 50% stake. If the whole company is only worth $100 in a year then the American people will get to split the last $50 amongst ourselves, not be on the hook for bailing out yet another failure.
My question is if there’s a stake to be had in the first place. We can’t keep absorbing their failures like we did X and xAI through the SpaceX Nasdaq scam. We need a stake without assuming the risks. The public already had the IP and are under no obligation to accept risks assumed by a bunch of entitled rich guys.
I guess “stake” is only meaningful when it’s defined as profits and not losses, since the public never agreed to the risks of potential losses and the billionaires are just stealing IP.
IDK what exactly you’re not understanding but I suspect it’s the difference between a gift and a purchase. The US will not be purchasing this 50% stake in OpenAI with additional money. It will be free. It was technically paid for with all the (not public) IP they used to create these models in the first place.
When you get something in return for nothing, that something is always a positive value even if it’s just a fraction of what it started as.
Bernie talking about that is interesting context but I wouldn’t expect the Trump admin to do anything similar to what he wanted with this anyway. 50% would be a terrible thing if it meant these goons get control…
5% of a negative number is negative
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.
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.
So if we agree that AI doesn’t need to use that much power; then we agree that we don’t need to spend that much money on hyper scalers or on data centers and that the AI goons can run their shit locally. This conversation is useless. the AI bros. can “run their own local model for the energy cost of watching tv” like you argument.
We don’t want this crap, easy as that, we don’t need data centers to be built. The AI bros that want to use AI for niche applications can use a local model. I don’t want an AI data center in my state or even my country. I don’t want my country to trash their own infrastructure by putting all investment in a dead end like AI. Super intelligence will never come. AGI will never come. I rather invest on people than on the delusions of the pedophiles and snake oil salesmen that follow the effective altruist movement. And i will never use AI. And i don’t care about the technology. I want to own my tech locally and not be renting compute to nazis and idiots like Sam Altman or Elon Musk.
Also AI industries will never make it’s investment back because in order to make a profit from that investment it needs something that resembles massive adoption and people paying for it. (or fucking over every computer user by turning them into subscribers for cloud compute.) And that won’t happen because if their wild predictions come true, nobody will have a job in that scenario. Renting AI for things you don’t do for a living is incredibly stupid.
The most likely scenario is that Hyper scalers and AI companies are hitting a wall and this is just a bribe for the US government to bail them out when they crash the economy. In my opinion when the crash comes these snake oil salesmen should be put in jail; not bailed out.
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.
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
The people: we want more socialized policies and government controls over big tech.
Govt: We are turning the US Government into a tech company
The people: No, not like that.
Privatize profits, nationalize debt.
Oh good, so the taxpayers will be on the hook both for the collapse of the financial markets and now the government too when AI shits the bed.
And then there’s these gullible rubes: https://www.humansfirst.com/
Bribing in advance. Professional right there.
Saw it coming. Corporate socialism for a failed industry to be used for government surveillance and weapons.
Where is the NYT economists telling us what a great idea this is?
They’re currently taking bids to see whose side they’re on.
Government buys worthless overhyped shit, bailing out investors…
Isn’t this a move out of China’s playbook?
No. This is a Murican as it gets. Big company gets greedy, goes bankrupt as its bosses make bank. Big company then gets bailed out with taxpayer money. The bosses make even bigger bank.
It’s actually kind of funny, because US liberals and conservatives SCREAM at the top of their lungs that 👏 Europe 👏 shouldn’t 👏 get 👏 to 👏 subsidize 👏 new 👏 industries 👏 or 👏 technology 👏…
But bailouts? That’s not a subsidies for failing companies (see Detroit motor city bankruptcy), that’s just giving “wealth creators” a helping hand because they’re “too big to fail” (monopoly, duopoly, triopoly, monopsony, oligopoly) so they can “trickle down” those subsidies to the economy…
Wait, what’s that? They usually just give themselves bonuses, leverage the shit out of the stocks and squirrel away the money in Cayman Island bank accounts? It’s happened many, may times already?!
Such free market. Much competition.
I don’t know what gives you the impression that the American people want bailouts. Nobody I have talked to about this or any of the other bailouts the American Government has done had been cool with it.
