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Bernie Sanders proposes bill to give the public a 50% stake in AI companies (mashable.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 65 points 5 months ago (15 children)

I love this idea, but I’m not sure if any AI company has made any profit to date lmao

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  • [–] 29 points 5 months ago* (14 children)

    No AI company will ever make a profit.

    That’s no excuse for you to forget that human rights is our ultimate goal.

    Never take your eye off the ball. Vote for humans. Fight for human equality. 🏳️‍🌈

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago

    The thing is, their values are overstated. It's a bubble economy. AI companies are racing for IPO specifically because they want to leave the public holding the bag when it finally crashes.

    I don't want any stake in AI companies.

    Government sponsored public investment funds should focus on stable, long-term investments and basic essentials like utilities, telecom, housing, agriculture, etc.

    I would include healthcare and education in that list but I believe those things shouldn't be monetized at all and should be entirely non-profit.

    But AI though is not a good investment. It only looks like one now because it's a pump and dump. A ponzi scheme, even.

    I expected Bernie to be better than this...

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (8 children)

    No AI company will ever make a profit.

    Microsoft, Facebook, and NVIDIA all make enormous profits.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    Year over a year, those profits are plummeting.

    AI companies, themselves, have never made a profit

    Like AI, you’re hallucinating

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  • [–] -2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    AI companies, themselves, have never made a profit

    Might as well say Internet Explorer has never turned a profit.

    They're being incorporated into highly profitable software vendors and foisted on profitable businesses.

    Meanwhile, the companies producing the models are rapidly enriching their owners and early investors. That looks like profit to me.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    NVidia is the one selling shovels to the golddiggers, a business that always was a profitable one. If AI goes bust, they can go back to selling GPUs to gamers.
    Microsoft makes profit because they get paid by OpenAI for their Azure platform.
    Facebook makes profit because of ads? Don't know why they were even mentioned here, their AI experiments seem mainly invested in making better bots for their platforms.

    No AI Company is profitable in any way, and barring some technological breakthrough, they never will be. Currently it's all subsidized with huge dollar amounts by venture capitalists. The problem is that inference is expensive (You need a specialized datacenter for Nvidias new hardware, the hardware itself is expensive, the training of models costs a lot and you can never stop training new ones just to keep up with the joneses, you need lots of power to run all of this, and the GPUs used have to be replaced on the regular).

    At the moment it all gets propped up by the largest financing rounds ever, and that is without even counting the Venture Capital that gets funneled to OpenAI/Anthropic through AI startups.

    Especially the subscription model will disappear very soon. Users with 200$ Subscriptions blow through tokens costing a multitude of what they pay. API pricing per token will be the default, and those prices will make every single AI startup weep as soon as the subsidies disappear, and then close up shop, which will be the beginning of the end for OpenAI/Anthropic.

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  • [–] -1 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Are you a one issue voter?

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