They should have broken up Google and Apple too. These businesses are too deeply-entwined with the federal government to properly (let alone fairly) prosecuted.
Unpopular opinion here but I don't see any benefit in breaking up goliaths like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI.
OpenAI (optically) came out of nowhere and took over everything in a few years. A future company also could. We should punish violation of regulations and the law when it occurs. We don't need to be interfering just because we feel a company is too good at being a company.
If OpenAI violated anything with the recent non-profit stuff, sue or charge them.
Reality: We need to reach AGI first (which means IPO at $1T and then sell our shares on the public market) before we can have discussions about a break up.
The argument sounds like he believes AI (+ robotics) will take jobs, and breaking up OpenAI could slow it down
Historically the most productive countries are the most prosperous - I think there is a big landscape of local maxima/minima in how healthy & happy a country/economy is, but shunning new technology has never been the path to Quality of Life. The only future where the US maintains its relative success involves American leadership in AI and robotics, with humans supporting them
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.
My best case scenario for AI is that it becomes a dirt cheap commodity. If the hyperscalers pour trillions into it, fail to build a moat around it, and end up giving newcomers the tools to replace them, that would be absolutely fantastic.
I think this is more a branding statement than an actual policy proposal. Breaking up OpenAI doesn't make any sense, not merely because it has intense competition, but also because it doesn't have meaningful internal business units whose collusion cause public policy problems.
Really, what he's saying is "OpenAI should make and spend less money". The honest policy proposal there is to tax the bejeezus out of it.
But Sanders has, for reasons I don't really understand, gone all in on a modern antitrust branding around "oligarchy", so that all his statements about excessive corporate power have to be about restructuring companies, rather than exercising the full portfolio of powers the government has to influence the economy.
You saw something similar a few days ago from Elizabeth Warren, who reacted to the UE1 outage by saying we should break up AWS. Not Amazon: AWS. Like, RDS and S3 should be different companies. That's not real; whether or not she understood what she was saying, she didn't mean it. What she means is she doesn't like huge corporations (fair enough).
It's annoying to have to read between the lines on these people, but I guess that's always been politics.
One of the saddest things about elderly American politicians is their inability to understand the nature of the globalized economy which necessitates competition.
"We should cripple our strongest AI Company" translates into "We will be subservient to foreign companies".
Just look at how the collapsed British Empire is trying to enforce its nonsensical censorship laws on American companies with no success.
Good luck getting DeepSeek to do what you want. See iRobot for an example of this American self-flagellation by the elderly in action.
I'm not sure if I understand how a break-up would work, but the sentiment that government be ready to nationalize or otherwise prevent a single company from potentially disrupting the whole economy seems obvious.
Perhaps it would look like this -- if you replace a worker with AI then you must still pay minimum wage straight into a public benefit tax.
>“I want to see us rebuilding manufacturing in America, but it ain’t going to do any worker any good if that manufacturing work is done by robots,” he said.
It's kind of like trying to preserve agricultural jobs by banning farm machinery. It's not the way to prosperity. People who would have dug potatoes become yoga instructors or web consultants or whatever.
22 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 47.2 ms ] threadOpenAI (optically) came out of nowhere and took over everything in a few years. A future company also could. We should punish violation of regulations and the law when it occurs. We don't need to be interfering just because we feel a company is too good at being a company.
If OpenAI violated anything with the recent non-profit stuff, sue or charge them.
What even is this as a platform? Yes, wealth inequality is bad, but what exactly does this do to solve it...?
Tech ludditism is the death drive externalized. Andrew Yang is all we have left for a pro tech left wing - and #Math isn’t going to win elections.
Historically the most productive countries are the most prosperous - I think there is a big landscape of local maxima/minima in how healthy & happy a country/economy is, but shunning new technology has never been the path to Quality of Life. The only future where the US maintains its relative success involves American leadership in AI and robotics, with humans supporting them
If Bernie just wants to slow down automation then breaking up OpenAI is not the way to do it.
Really, what he's saying is "OpenAI should make and spend less money". The honest policy proposal there is to tax the bejeezus out of it.
But Sanders has, for reasons I don't really understand, gone all in on a modern antitrust branding around "oligarchy", so that all his statements about excessive corporate power have to be about restructuring companies, rather than exercising the full portfolio of powers the government has to influence the economy.
You saw something similar a few days ago from Elizabeth Warren, who reacted to the UE1 outage by saying we should break up AWS. Not Amazon: AWS. Like, RDS and S3 should be different companies. That's not real; whether or not she understood what she was saying, she didn't mean it. What she means is she doesn't like huge corporations (fair enough).
It's annoying to have to read between the lines on these people, but I guess that's always been politics.
"We should cripple our strongest AI Company" translates into "We will be subservient to foreign companies".
Just look at how the collapsed British Empire is trying to enforce its nonsensical censorship laws on American companies with no success.
Good luck getting DeepSeek to do what you want. See iRobot for an example of this American self-flagellation by the elderly in action.
Perhaps it would look like this -- if you replace a worker with AI then you must still pay minimum wage straight into a public benefit tax.
It's kind of like trying to preserve agricultural jobs by banning farm machinery. It's not the way to prosperity. People who would have dug potatoes become yoga instructors or web consultants or whatever.