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- Hacker News
- As near as I can tell, their logic is basically:
1. Imagine AI replaces all jobs.
2. Since AI is controlled by a very small number of people, they will be the ones that get all the money, since they are doing all the work.
3. Since there are no jobs, everyone else will die because they won't have money to buy anything.
But this causal chain makes no sense.
Imagine that I find a Magic Lamp that grants me unlimited wishes. Suddenly, I don't have to work! I wish for a sandwich, I get a sandwich. I wish for a car, I get a car. Etc.
Does the economy collapse? Of course not, because everyone else still has to work for a living (the poor fools). The fact that I don't need a job has effectively removed me from the economy.
One day I discover that I can wish for another Magic Lamp! I give the new Magic Lamp to another family and now they remove themselves from the economy. After a few weeks, 10,000 people have their own Magic Lamp. Has the economy collapsed? No, because the remaining 8 billion people still form a robust economy.
In this scenario, the economy won't suffer until a significant percent--maybe 50% or maybe 90%--have Magic Lamps. But at that point, it's no longer controlled by a "small number of people."
One argument is that once I have a Magic Lamp, I can disrupt the economy by (e.g.) creating cars for free and selling them for cheap. There's no incentive for me to do this--I don't need money--but let's pretend I'm doing it just to help people. Now a lot of people have cars but also a lot of car builders are out of a job. That sucks.
But wait! More cars also means more jobs. If you don't have to pay for a car, then you can use the money to pay for a driver. You have more cars, so you're paying more for insurance, so now there are more insurance jobs. There are more accidents, which sadly require more hospitals. And we need to hire people to dispose of all these cars at end-of-life.
If I use the Magic Lamp to get rid of part of the economy, the other parts get bigger because (a) there is more money to spend on it, and (b) there is often more need.[1]
The only way I can really destroy the economy with a Magic Lamp is to give everyone a Magic Lamp. But that's not a dystopia--that would be paradise!
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[1] If you don't believe this, just consider farming. Farming used to be 90% of the economy. Now the revenue from farming is concentrated in less than 5% of the people of the US. Did everyone else starve? Are we all out of jobs? No--the rest of the economy grew.
by GMoromisato - People on the internet have some weird fantasy. News at 6.
Seriously why would Norway do that? With a fraction of that amount of money they can build energy and computing facilities. They can distill OpenAI models. Why would that bet all on one single company?
The US won't let Norway do that anyway. Biden blocked Japan's Nippon Steel from buying US Steel[0]:
by raincole - There are definitely some weird mass psychological movements on the internet right now and I basically view this post as a wishcasting outcropping of this, stories the disempowered tell themselves.by whimsicalism
- Nothing special about OpenAI to deserve a buyout.by glitchc
- I think Norway should not waste money on this.
I think OpenAI’s does not have ANY moat. They are currently a leader but lack the piles of cash required to stay a leader in the medium/long-term. (They can not in anyway compete with AWS/Alphabet on that front, and they know that too.)
Researchers and engineer will want big comp, as they can get it elsewhere, if you stop paying that, then you loose the knowledge necessary to stay a leader, even though it’s a losing race in the long-term anyway. The company will become a growing pile of non-SOTA techniques and models + old hardware in no time.
Why waste that money…?
by hashstring - OpenAI is worth $800B because that’s what the last funding round valued it at. It does not mean that >50% of existing shareholders will agree to sell for that amount. If a serious buyer does emerge they will likely hold out for 2x that, maybe more.by paxys
- Or 2x less. 800B valued is not 800B invested. And it wouldn't be the first time investors sell at a loss if sentiment declines.by einrealist
- Not to mention that the US would have to approve the sale to another country, which they are unlikely to do.by layer8
- OpenAI is worth the discounted value of their future free cash flow. It's not clear at this point how much free cash flow they will ever generate, if any.by boplicity
- As someone who is a citizen of Norway and does follow our local politics.
I can say with a high sense of certainty, that this is not going to happen. There is no political appetite to do anything this radical, and anyone trying to get this done. Would run into a problems with an electorate that would view this a playing games with its money, and a political establishment, that could easily be even more horrified over this idea.
by einarfd - Why on earth would Norway do a charity to the world? The oil fund while it has some moral guidelines, profit making is still the primary goal. There is no guarantee OpenAI will be profitable ever.by vinni2
- Yes, and I think you would get much more effect by going for much smaller and cheaper firms.
Cerebras is only 700 people. I wouldn't buy it, but since it's only 700 people, you can probably build something like it with 1400 people in a couple of years if you set the goals right and hire the right people to lead it.
Euclyd, VSORA etc. exist. If they were buying American, why not Groq.
Then once one has good hardware without an enormous markup, then one can start thinking about building LLMs with it.
- I would agree with this, except it sits on the thesis that one company really has that much of an impact. I don't think it actually does. AI is here and it will continue to progress. Norway controlling OpenAI is not going to change it's trajectory -- the cat is already out of the bag.by stanfordkid
- Yudkowsky's solution of detecting and physically shutting down non complying datacenter, including bombing if the country doesn't cooperate, isn't too much out of the question.
We would have done the same if it is about virus or nuclear weapons, and AI could become serious existential threat in the next 5 years.
- OpenAI may be what IBM was to PC or Motorola was to mobile phones. PC and mobile phones certainly changed the world but IBM nor Motorola controlled that change.by httpz
- That's a really unfortunate framing. The cat isn't out of the bag; otherwise, there wouldn't be efforts to scale up data centers to support forecasted demand.
The inevitability narrative is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it ends if we decide not to keep telling it.
by liliumregale - In the history of the world, one company can absolutely have world changing impact. From the British East India company to Kodak to Google, one company can have that much of an impact. Whether OpenAI is such a company is a different question for future history books to decide, but that part of their thesis at least is borne out by history.by fragmede
- Would Norway be prepared to commit to huge future capex spending? Like the pitch that OpenAI is going to achieve AGI seems to rely on vast investments in more compute over the coming years. If you just pay the $800B and then take your foot off the gas, do you still have a frontier lab or have you just paid a lot of money to remove a competitor from the market?by Imnimo
- When I think of Norway, the first thing that comes to mind is its willingness to commit to huge future capex spending. Not to mention, selling more than half its equities in order to buy one risky asset totally aligns with its investment strategy and, you know, having to pay pensions, other minor concerns like that.
In all seriousness though it is pretty interesting to consider if it really happened, a sovereign wealth fund pivots to the crazy high risk strategy, writes a blank check and tries to actually win. If it works does that country just become the rulers of the world?
by ngriffiths - Norway doesn't have to fund future capex just like OpenAI doesn't have to fund future capex. They both borrow the capital.by panarky
- We see in practice that the last to adopt technology do in fact have newer tech than the ones who started it. IE 3G in Asia vs land lines in USA.
So all they have to do is wait a bit and build a frontier model of their own.
- > achieve AGI
They might as well invest in cold fusion, warm superconductivity, curing cancer or whatever sci-fi concept you have.
by geon - Reminds me of that article about Nevada's pension fund manager, his job is just come into the office and not do anything stupid like dump half the fund on a single speculative investment. https://web.archive.org/web/20171202134916/https://www.wsj.c...
- This is a very "funny" post:
- OpenAI can easily not become anything of significance in the future, even if the OP's prediction of the future becomes reality. I'd argue that being bought by a government and controlled within the ethical confines of that government would be a great way for OpenAI to quickly fall behind its peers who aren't subject to such regulations (which is the entire point of this post in the first place).
- Norway may be a great country ran by a great government, but that doesn't mean they would be a great leader of some AI revolution. Not only is the bar for being a competent government not particularly high on the world scale, but the skills of a competent government don't necessarily translate to the skills of an AI revolution Sherpa. I don't see why the OP feels Norway wouldn't use an advanced AI to simply enrich itself while leaving other countries to fend for themselves. It's not like Norway's fund is designed to serve the rest of the world as it is, nor is it the case that Norwegians would allow their government to serve other countries at the cost of their own well being.
- Those at OpenAI would either (a) never entertain this offer or (b) would sell to Norway if this exact thesis wasn't true (i.e., they'd be happy to sell if they thought OpenAI was going to become worthless anyway). Using the logic that the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global can just buy OpenAI because it has more money than a given valuation for OpenAI is embarrassing. It lacks any understanding of how businesses and investments work, let alone how investments in these specific businesses work. I mean, the OP starts this post off explaining how they think OpenAI can effectively rule the world once their expectations for their technology is realized. Why would they sell their ticket to unlimited wealth for a relatively small offer?
by nater5000 - I agree, except for the second point. An owner isn't a leader. An owner isn't a Sherpa. An owner just owns. Many businesses can do perfectly fine without an active owner, and the owners that do make a difference for their ownee, often make things worse for their ownee, for society at large, or both.by vintermann
- Haven't read the blog, but I can think of a good reason to sell. HQ moves to Norway, no more direct US government interference.
(they can still interfere, just not anywhere near the same scope)
You may think "but government ownership means more interference", and yes, but not radicalized, crazy assed, mercurial, emotional interference.
by b112 - It is like a running joke that Norway can buy anything. The oil fund makes more money than the oil for the state btw. So don't underestimate their financial skills.
- Just to be clear to those replying to me about the ethical considerations: the point I'm trying to make isn't that these companies shouldn't be ethical; it's that if they actually behaved ethically (at least in the way this blog post describes), they'd be at an extreme disadvantage compared to these other companies who aren't behaving ethically. Norway will have invested in a company just to run it into the ground by enforcing stricter ethical constraints on it compared to its peers.
This dynamic is definitely not limited to AI companies and it's pretty obvious to anyone who has ever contemplated the ethics of capitalism as a whole. And if it matters, I don't think these companies behave particularly unethically compared to other large companies. You can take issue with where the baseline of ethics has been set of these kinds of companies, but at the end of the day ethics is a constraint that limits the success of a company in terms of our capitalistic system. Inducing a stronger version of this constraint in a single company, regardless of how preposterous the scenario is, will necessarily lead to that company doing worse than it would have otherwise. The OP doesn't address this dynamic in their post, but it's also a fundamental dynamic of the premise of their post.
by nater5000 - Especially government of a small, homogenous country with massive oil wealth in a peaceful part of the world. It's very much "easy mode" as far as governments go.by HPsquared
- Ah, good old "ethical confines" the thing that holds all sorts of things back.. back from what ?
Mostly back from exploiting the easily exploited and not paying for externalities.
I think Norway would have too much sense to entertain buying this, of course it would be fun because you'd hope they would remove Sam Altman and you might have an AI company not run by someone who spouts the absolute rubbish that current AI leaders do, they are all completely cringeworthy.
by stuaxo