(not intending ot be snarky, but this isn't my area of knowledge in the least.) Didn't the AI organizations 'get it both ways' when they trained on vast collection of works under copyright and then purely "own' the outcome?
That's not snarky at all, that's exactly the point. They did get it both ways.
The comment I was responding to argued that ownership of non-physical things is basically a "polite lie" and that information is just entropy that belongs to whoever can capture it. My point was that the AI companies clearly don't believe that when it applies to them. They patent their architectures, copyright their outputs, sue competitors for IP violations, and lock down their model weights. They fully believe in ownership of non-physical things.
But when it comes to the billions of people whose work they trained on? Suddenly information is free-flowing entropy that belongs to no one.
That's the asymmetry at the heart of this. The rules around IP apparently apply when it protects their profits, but not when it would obligate them to share those profits with the people whose work made them possible. Which is exactly why the public needs to assert a claim now, before that asymmetry gets any more entrenched.
Also worth knowing: collective intellectual property already exists. ASCAP and BMI have been doing exactly this for decades. Individual songwriters can't enforce their rights every time their music gets played, so they pool their IP, license it collectively, and distribute the revenue. The problem they solved is almost identical to the training data problem. Each individual contribution is tiny, but the collective value is enormous. Applying this at the scale of the general public would be novel, but the underlying mechanism isn't. The concept works. It just hasn't been applied to training data yet.
I mean, the AI companies want it this way, but the same laws of information apply to them too. They can patent whatever they want, but as we see other nations use their models to distill information to other models with almost nothing they can do about it.
Patents, copyright, lawsuits are all post ad hoc actions which mean the milk has already been stolen. And it only works if the rule of law is something that is respected, that's not going so well lately.
We are seeing this in that there is little to no moat between the models, nearly everyone with the needed compute seems to catch up pretty quickly. And when said rivalries cross national boarders the only solution to these problems quickly becomes violence.
With how information works AI wins this game in the long run. Individual humans scale poorly and their ability to individually acquire information is a slow process. Looking at this on a company by company basis is not the proper way to show how the future with models is going to play out.
This is interesting.
As a naive user I’ve gotten the gut feeling of commoditization among the models. I assumed the data center capacity push is intended to be the differentiator but that still seems utility-like over time. (and the data centers in space concept seems like good PR and IR, but to me, technically… ambitious)
> In your opinion, what is the best approach, if any, to attempt to address it?
There aren't many options for fighting the tax man, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes". You're only option is to leave the US for somewhere better.
Correct, the US is one of the few countries that tries to collect (Federal) income tax from all citizens regardless of the country they are currently living in. To be fair, when you can prove that income is entirely foreign (not a single US company in the chain of ownership) that income becomes almost entirely deductible and the tax reporting essentially just a census on how well US citizens are doing from an income standpoint globally. (For people that want economics analyses of US influence in global politics, that census can be handy to spin.)
I think the root problem with how the US currently spends its tax dollars is the above "vote with your wallet" belief in the first place. "Vote with your wallet" implies that the rich deserve more votes. That's not (representative) democracy, that is oligarchy. Right now the US has two political parties that are both "vote with your wallet parties". They both act like they are bake sales that constantly need everyone's $20 bills just to "survive", but as much as anything they are trying to make US citizens complicit in agreeing that the rich deserve more votes and should control more US policy.
I think the only real solution to a lot of US ills is drastic Campaign Finance Reform.
Minor correction, expat income is deductible up to (currently) $130k under the FEIE. After that it's taxes as usual. There's also an array of other mandatory forms like FBAR for foreign accounts, and the nightmare that is form 5471, with absolutely wild allowances for the IRS to impose penalties, often with no statute of limitations and per-violation fines. For example, a US citizen with multiple bank accounts and a mistake in FBAR reporting for multiple years running will be liable for the (iirc) $10,000 fine for each bank account, and each year (e.g. 4 accounts, 8 years, $320,000 fine).
Living and doing business overseas is as a US citizen is a high risk endeavor.
FEIE is only one of the options for avoiding federal income tax. The other is the Foreign Tax Credit, which has no such limit: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1116.pdf. If the place an American lives and works has a higher income tax rate than the US one, in practice he will not face any tax liability, regardless of income level.
Unfortunately, campaign finance reform would possibly require a constitutional amendment, or at the very least a big shift in how the supreme court views things (so, not likely in my lifetime), since the current jurisprudence is that limiting campaign donations is a violation of first amendment rights.
Yes, many countries have significant limits on campaign donations. Even third parties are restricted from advertising on behalf of a party, and so on.
So no company can simply donate large sums of money, nor can any single person.
The goal is that individuals will be the largest donors, not companies, and that as everyone is capped in the same way, advertising will be a more level playing field. We don't want money in politics. At the same time, we want all parties to get their message out there, their message heard.
It's not perfect. There are issues. But this business of democracy should be taken seriously.
The US technically even has laws that that were supposed to do that still on the books. A particular problem was a very broken decision by the US Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [1] that opened too large of a barn door that the US has been reeling from ever since. That trial argued that companies were individuals/people and that money was the "free speech" of companies and shouldn't ever be curtailed. So there are so many things wrong with that court case on so many levels. It led to the rise of Super PACs (Political Action Committees), companies designed to launder money for political gain where the donors are allowed to remain anonymous and the Super PAC "speak" for them, because now it was "free speech" and not bribes and regulatory capture.
I know pessimists that believe the only way the US succeeds in the Campaign Finance Reform it needs now is through a Constitutional Amendment and if we can't count on Congress to be interested in it (due to bribery), and not enough individual States seem to care (some because they want a chunk of that pie), it's going to take a full Constitutional Convention to pass that amendment, something that hasn't successfully been done in the US since 1787 (also, the first attempt).
There have been some fairly longstanding judicial decisions overturned recently, although I know the reasons are not in alignment with the decision you mention, it does mean there is hope for such change.
So maybe it's actually far less work than considered. Maybe, attacking the decision with a modern eye is helpful.
Citizens United was a 2010 decision. Several of the judges on that case are still sitting judges in the Supreme Court. Since then one of the Congressional oversight decisions on vetting replacements for Supreme Court judges has been whether or not they (at least claim to) agree with the Citizens United decision.
The decision was made in the modern eye, in my lifetime. (The country needed modern Campaign Finance Reform before that point as well, but that decision marks an inflection point from Campaign Finance Reform feeling possible through normal means and court decisions to nearly impossible to overturn in our lifetimes.)
For the ultra-wealthy, leaving the United States is rarely the preferred strategy; instead, they use their immense resources to legally reshape the tax code and utilize complex loopholes. Billionaires like the Koch and Scaife families historically avoided massive estate and gift taxes by creating "charitable lead trusts" and private foundations. This allowed them to pass fortunes down to their heirs tax-free, provided they donated the interest to charities (which they often controlled) for a set period. A powerful approach is to fund political movements to slash taxes for the top brackets. For example, a coalition of eighteen of the wealthiest US families spent nearly half a billion dollars collectively to successfully lobby for the reduction and eventual repeal of the "death tax" (estate tax), saving themselves an estimated $71 billion.
And, of course, in the ancient world, free citizens of Greece and Rome considered direct taxes tyrannical and usually avoided them, leaving such burdens to conquered populations.
So I guess taxes are uncertain, but only for the oligarchy.
Clinical studies today are funded entirely by the pharma companies, keep that. Selling at cost of production would be something extra, for patients who want the drugs but aren't enrolled in an actual study. The company doesn't get solid data it can use for regulatory approval, so making them donate the drugs in that case seems excessive.
A downside would be that for drugs that don't cost much to produce, patients might be less willing to enroll in the studies, given the chance of getting a placebo. That could be handled by shutting down the informal access while the study is enrolled, for anyone who's eligible. I'm sure there are other wrinkles that would need to be considered too.
Put this way, this seems reasonable. Beyond cell therapy, I don't thin the cost of drug is the motivation for not making it more freely available. 'Misuse' leading to potential liability or unjustified bad outcomes, along with some regulatory burden seems like the issue.
Knowing whether drugs work isn’t trivial. Patients are typically very heterogeneous in their responses to drugs. For example, pembrolizumab (the most successful cancer drug ever) typically only works in, say 30% of patients depending of the cancer type. Just throwing therapeutic ideas out there and letting physicians sort out how to use them and in which patients, isn’t a panacea. Looking at clinical data can be like star gazing even in planned studies. Structured, statistically powered studies, and costly rigorous assays on biomarkers and correlative studies are essential for understanding how and in what patients drugs are working. I’m all for expanding access to drugs, and there is abundant waste and greed in big Pharma and venture, but there are also people doing hard expensive science, medicine and manufacturing. Im not sure I have the answer. A “yelp for medicine” won’t improve immediate outcomes, nor longer term understanding and progress. A great and excruciating read about the tension there is a real-time blog (the story’s story) that was written by Jake Seliger unt he passed in 2023.
Go watch or listen to Plenary Session, and you'll have direct access to his thoughts. My ability to rehash Prasad's arguments doesn't have any bearing on what I wrote.
Slightly different point but many bacteria in us right now also make lipopolysaccharide (LPS). If it were purified and injected iv, the LPS in me could probably kill me 1000 x over.
LPS is a critical component of gram negative bacteria, like E. coli.
We evolved LPS detection so long ago that it's in our innate immune system instead of adaptive immunity. It's so ancient we share this immune function with fruit flies.
LPS detection is so good and immediate because it's tuned to pick up single instances of LPS molecules. Not a few nmol. Single molecules. Detection will trigger inflammation and immune scale up to deal with the problem.
If you go injecting LPS or E coli into your blood stream, of course your own body is going to kill you. It'll freak out and think WW III has started and begin firing the nukes in every direction to stop it.
I agreee with the caution. I am not endocrinologist enough to
guess what may happen and when. Because of the level of variably in all that is being experimented with, my guess is there may be a slower burn rather than explosion of odd toxicities. It does feel like stuff will happen.
Will side effects for hormonal and gene therapy approaches be shaken out in just 3-5 years? For gene therapy, the rare blood cancers associated with car-t or bluebirdbio suggest maybe not. Maybe they remain rare, but as scale and flexibility of use increases, how that may evolve. Hormones are a whole different calculation. With the creative and dosing, combinations, and applications I’m not sure how many from conclusions will be available. I’m not judging good/bad here, I’m just thinking that this “democratization” of medicines (maybe otherwise not available to some) will increase access, with both risks and benefits.
“Viruses” have a very broad feature set-beyond evoking Batman, it seems like a lot of details need to be hammered out here, even residually chlorinated water can be problematic in maintaining titers.
IMO, These days, public health policy (conspiracy?) seems to be a more efficient way to spread pathogens. Not precise targeting tho.
