Sanders: Government Should Break Up Openai

I think he is a senator from one of them small states north of new york city

Has Sanders worked on that?

Why would the government break up an entity that is incredibly useful to them as-is?

Bell also "just" provided telephone service, but had a nation-wide practical monopoly, and so was broken up into different regional operators.

The US has since gotten bad at dealing with companies like this. A company like Google or Amazon could/should be broken up into a few parts and would likely result in those parts together being worth more than when it was just the one company, and more competition in each industry.

Too early and the break-up can kill innovation. Too late and the company will have been a rent-seeking operation for so long that it chokes out dynamism.

It might be too early for OpenAI, but we shouldn't wait until they own all of the next Internet in the way Facebook, Google and Amazon ended up.

No, they don't? Sora is a separate product, and they're working on a social media platform. And that thing with Jony Ive. Other things, too, that I'm sure I'm forgetting.

At any rate, this looks like they made a headline out of a passing comment. I wouldn't read too much into it.

Edit: lol at the AI bros downvoting facts.

This is Bernie Sanders trying to do populism on a subject he doesn't know much about.

And the one product is made up of two components (training and inference) which are each extremely competitive, undifferentiated, and losing money.

Break it off from Microsoft definitely. Same with Github I think.

You don’t see a single benefit? You think monopoly power is worthwhile?

> A future company also could.

Then they should be broken up too.

> We don't need to be interfering just because we feel a company is too good at being a company.

We absolutely do, because "being good at being a company" has become a sort of paperclip-maximizing game that is pretty well divorced from anything beneficial to society.

> We should punish violation of regulations and the law when it occurs

The law includes regulations around competition and monopoly which companies frequently violate, and the consequences can sometimes be as severe as getting "broken up".

I don't think Bernie's on to anything here, but competition law is good actually.

There don't seem to be any substantial federal legal issues in OpenAI converting one of its units from a non-profit to a for-profit corporation. This is almost entirely a state issue, and OpenAI was able to get the California state government to go along with the plan by threatening to move to another state. For better or worse that's the way our dual sovereignty federal system works.

The other companies you mentioned are making more money from AI than OpenAI is. And Microsoft owns a huge chunk of OpenAI too.

I agree. Consumer-friendly regulation is much more valuable.

Also it remains to be seen how long OpenAI will even survive. They are losing a ton of money and don't really have much of a moat.

Calling Sanders a liberal has never been accurate, identifying him with Democrats is a sign of political color-blindness.

Harrison Bergeron, maybe?

Bernie Sanders is not a democrat or liberal, he is a democratic socialist who specifically runs as an independent.

That normal liberals are so deeply associated with his ilk by the national electorate to the point Harris was considered more radical than Trump is a whole can of worms in itself.

Sanders has always like this. In fact his policy is quite different from the "mainstream" Domocrats and always has been.

"Liberals are struggling" "this as a platform" if you try to conclude what the "platform" is from Sanders' opinions you'll be quite far from the truth.

Andrew Yang isn't left-wing wtf. People think Obama is left-wing too, people are so politically confused

> The only future where the US maintains its relative success involves American leadership in AI and robotics, with humans supporting them

I never understood this take. It strikes me more as "faith in our lord and savior AI" without actual evidence to support this.

Ah yes, the magic job fairy. Because there were jobs in the past, there will be jobs in the future.

There were also skid rows after industrialization in the US. Lots of people didn't make it out of them to the post ww2 jobs everyone thinks about when they say 'industrialization brought good jobs'.

There were also flop houses post industrialization, where you could rent yourself your own section of rope to lean on for the night.

But yep, after WW2 there were lots of jobs in the US. When did industrialization happen though? Why do we ignore all those that didn't make it out of skid row/flop houses and jump to an implied 1940s+ jobs market?

Not all technology is adopted equally, though. Traditionally we pick and choose which technologies to adopt based on their usefulness and efficiency, rather than adopting absolutely everything because it falls under the banner of "technology".

I am a +1 for productivity. Personal productivity. Countries with the highest productivity equating to highest prosperity is fine but it overlooks the acceleration income disparity. I struggle to reconcile with that.

The most productive countries are the most prosperous for the owner class. Ask a random citizen from West Virginia how much they've benefited from the market share of Nvidia increasing

That doesn't mean that technology has to be shoveled out to the public by the truckload. A country can have a productive pharmaceutical industry without being full of drug addicts. Also, there can be technological advances without having them concentrated in a small number of companies.

“Startup”.

He thinks that is one part of the solution so you’re obviously not arguing in good faith.

I've never heard him say that he believes rent control will solve housing affordability. Can you share where you've seen him say that?

I've seen him say it will prevent landlord exploitation, but by definition - almost any pragmatic appliance of rent control will admit a goal of cheaper month-to-month rent. At present, a lot of rental properties have a monthly payment that are equal to - or sometimes more - than mortgage payments for similar* offerings in the same area.

It then follows logically that if rent control leads to cheaper rent, and a lot of rent costs are presently equal to or more than mortgage payments, then it makes renting affordability easier - and housing affordability is still innately more expensive. Rent control is a rent solution, and I guess it makes RENTAL of housing more affordable - which is good. But it's not a solution for the costs of buying houses.