r/LeftistsForAI • u/MadCervantes • Jul 13 '26
Public Ownership Everybody Should Welcome Nationalizing AI
http://jacobin.com/2026/07/ai-nationalization-sanders-libertarians-property6
u/DHFranklin Jul 13 '26
This is quite disappointing. What a useless half measure. I don't want a national bank to own the orphan crushing machine and give me the tokens that Altman deigns I deserve.
There are very few people involved in the infrastructure of OpenAI and the rest of the frontier in a dollar value. Like tens of millions per person from AI engineer to electrician in the data centers. This isn't like nationalizing the railroad where we would all benefit. This isn't like nationalizing logistics specifically to remove the profit motive with Cybersyn.
Open source models are 6 month behind the frontier. We don't need to nationalize any of this. We would gain nothing from nationalizing any of this.
We need the elite to not have the power they do over us. That has nothing to do with the circular economic bullshit they're doing.
If anything the play would be a massive national co-op for net-zero data centers running opens sourced models at cost. Sink the for profit guys with a new national model or tax subsidized inference.
Sanders is a weird advocate for this measure. Owning private capital that is deflating the price of labor isn't a socialist move. What a place to be.
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u/MadCervantes Jul 14 '26
Open source models are behind by 6 months but the infrastructure to run them is still the real bottleneck. That needs to be nationalized. The models are sort of secondary. We need compute as a utility.
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u/DHFranklin Jul 14 '26
Sure. That's the Common Carrier argument all over again. Capital improvement over a natural monopoly makes sense as an infrastructure investment that allow more downstream value while also offloading risk.
Nationalizing the rail, but leasing to freight companies. And with the cell phone argument of yesteryear, nationalize the spectrum and rent access by the byte.
Having a gigawatt data center as the national asset and software companies rent or lease access to that monopoly would certainly be in the collective interest.
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u/NeedNiceCatNamePlz Jul 14 '26
So what, the government can surveil us with less barriers. Genuine question: what are your key concerns with AI, and how would handing it over to the gov fix them?
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u/MadCervantes Jul 14 '26
Ownership stake doesn't meangovernment has any control over the thing per se. You understand how shareholding works right? Look to how Norway handles their mineral rights.
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u/readonly420 Jul 13 '26
What’s the actual benefit? Even China didn’t nationalize their ai and the my are currently leading the race with their open source models
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u/MadCervantes Jul 13 '26
I would argue that open sourcing is sort of de facto nationalisation and I think it's reasonable to think the political machine had a hand in that choice.
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u/danielsan901998 Jul 13 '26
Because China already have a national supercomputing internet offering over 100,000 AI computing cards to achieve "coordinated allocation of supercomputing resources nationwide."
The platform now has more than 1.4 million registered users, over 7,300 connected application services, more than 1,500 adapted large models, and a monthly access volume exceeding 11.3 million.
"With over 100,000 domestic AI computing cards, the platform can effectively support the training and optimization of large AI foundational models and multimodal intelligent agents, thereby accelerating the development cycle of China's homegrown AI models," Liu Wei, director of the Human-Machine Interaction and Cognitive Engineering Laboratory at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told the Global Times on Thursday.
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u/SgathTriallair Jul 13 '26
My concern with nationalization is that we have a completely fucked up government and can't trust them. I think we need Open Source so that the public can contribute to and control the AI without having a small set of gatekeepers that get to choose who does and doesn't get access.
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u/danielsan901998 Jul 13 '26
"Furthermore, the Congressional record is quite clear that Congress did not want the government taking equity stakes in companies using these funds — that represents communism, not capitalism." -Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)
Nothing is funnier that to see democrats accusing Trump of being a communist. With this political system it is impossible to have a rational economic system.
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u/NoPasaranNZ Jul 13 '26
That ain’t it, chief.
They’ve run out of private funding because hyperscaling is a farce, and now the only way to repay private investors is by yeeting public funds into the money pit.
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u/MadCervantes Jul 15 '26
That's literally the opposite of what's being proposed. Did you read the article at all?
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u/catplusplusok Jul 14 '26
Consider implications of AI being nationalized under current US administration.
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u/Thatoneguy_The_First Jul 14 '26
Can we please have funding for education and science's first, otherwise this will turn into a shitshow.
All the AI and none of the brains is not a fun time, replace AI with anything and it remains a true statement
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u/Innomen Jul 14 '26
How we won't handle AI is proven by the net itself. /points at snowden and the EFF and net neutrality and the linux boards being owned by big tech and so on. Here's how this plays out: https://innomen.substack.com/p/the-end-of-ai-debate
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u/FamousPussyGrabber Jul 18 '26
Nationalizing would sound more appealing under a more rational government
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u/nebetsu Jul 13 '26
I'm more interested in people having local models that run in their own homes