alt Hacker NewsThe training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing.
Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."
We are in exactly that window right now with AI. The resource is being extracted at an incredible pace and almost all the value is flowing to a handful of companies. The longer people wait to assert sovereign ownership over the collective intelligence that makes AI possible, the harder it becomes.
If you think this is crazy, ask yourself what’s actually crazier: demanding a share of the value built on your collective labor, or watching trillions of dollars get extracted from it and saying nothing.
the idea of Alaskans getting a check just for existing sounded crazy too, right up until it didn’t.
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if you assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space.
But the model is built on us. You can move the server anywhere you want. You can’t escape the fact that everything inside it came from human minds. That’s an ownership claim no one can relocate away from.
You can only use each barrel of oil once, so it is not remotely the same thing. It's like torrenting a movie vs stealing someone's car. My labor has been compensated and nothing has been extracted.
Can't really do that for AI. What you gonna do, tax their use of scraped data ? How would even that be implemented ?
> 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?
This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is.
Every human uses that "resource" to train themselves, and now they use AI to supercharge that consumption.
The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin?
I get the gatekeepers are pissed, LLMs are way cheaper than those expensive gate fees, and I cannot come up with a good faith argument about how giving the power of SOTA LLMs to anyone for $20/mo is somehow evil or bad.
In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream.
If you want UBI, then the framing shouldn't be around "whoever had content on the internet circa 2024 is entitled to lifetime AI company payouts that effectively act as permanent unemployment checks."
> Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."
This is also true for the first commercially exploited natural gas fields in the world, in the Netherlands. This ruined the Dutch manufacturing industry, and became a textbook example of tge development of one sector harming others known as Dutch disease [].
AI has a great potential like this too..
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease