Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value

Isn't that how communism (should have) worked?



Alaska and Norway aren't communist. They're capitalist economies with thriving private sectors. Oil companies still operate, still profit, still compete. The public just gets a share of the value extracted from a collectively owned resource.

The Alaska Permanent Fund has been running since 1982 inside the most conservative state in America. Norway's sovereign wealth fund is the largest on earth and their economy is doing fine.

These models work.. work well... And they exist comfortably within mixed market economies.

The question is whether the public gets a cut when private companies build fortunes on a collectively generated resource, or whether they don't. We already know the answer can be yes without anything breaking.

Our entire white collar system might be a house of cards with AI, what I am proposing is a safe hedge against a future with potentially massive wealth inequality, and increased unemployment. But this isn't just about protection from injury... people should BENEFIT massively.


ok, fair enough. I think I misread your first comment.

not sure if that would work in this case since all these companies scraped (publicly) available data? So with the right resources anyone could redo it?


Well, two things worth considering.

First, training isn't a one-time event. These companies are continuously scraping new data, training new model generations, ingesting new human output. Every new model is a new extraction event. The fact that GPT-4 already trained on your 2022 blog post doesn't mean the window is closed. GPT-6 will train on your 2025 and 2026 output too. There's always a live point at which to assert a collective claim.

Likely - these models will always be training on us to better understand us and continue to be of value to us commercially.

Second, "anyone could redo it with the right resources" is technically true but practically meaningless. Anyone could theoretically drill for oil too. The barrier was never access to the crude sitting in the ground. It was the billions in infrastructure needed to extract and refine it. Same here. The data is public, but the compute required to turn it into a frontier model costs billions. That concentration of capital is exactly why a public claim on the value makes sense, just like it did with oil.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: