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by altmanaltman 22 days ago
There is absolutely 0 chance Anthropic or OpenAI will get a government bailout (it might still happen in this admin but it makes no sense). These companies are not like banks which are fundamentally important to the economy. Sure AI is important but Google is not going to die. Why would you save OpenAI and Anthropic when google, amazon or microsoft can just gobble them up when/if needed?

The average taxpayer gets 0 benefits from LLM. It might change in the future but for now that is true. This was exactly the reverse with banking, everyone would lose their own money if the banks just disappear tomorrow
4 comments
shaewest 22 days ago
If you look at it from the perspective of the current US administration, they see that almost all GDP growth in the past year(?) has been related to data center growth. If all of a sudden that industry is gone, you're looking at GDP stagnation or drop that looks terrible for the current party, hence the potential for a bailout.

Personally I hold the opinion that the investment into data centers would shift into something else, so no real GDP drop, but I'm not sure that's a certainty the same as 'bailout keeps the current story going'

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janalsncm 22 days ago
Imo the data centers is where things start to get scary. Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t themselves indispensable, but when all of the industries downstream of them taking on more and more debt to supply projected usage in the future I could see the USG forced to bail someone out, if only to shore up their creditors.
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leobuskin 22 days ago
That's not a bailout for AI labs, I meant the "bailout" for Salesforce and others. There's absolutely no place for them in the world where we have Fable+ models. For many of them. Most of them (we just didn't get this feeling yet). Someone just trying to maintain the old world order, that's all. I don't think US economy would fail if those absolutely useless giants would go down.
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fragmede 22 days ago
> The average taxpayer gets 0 benefits from LLM.

Sure they do. Someone they know is using AI to ask for help with something, which makes their life easier, which makes things easier on them as well, which is a benefit.

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pfannkuchen 22 days ago
> everyone would lose their own money if the banks just disappear tomorrow

Sure, but only because banks are legally allowed to lie to customers about how much money they have.

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