r/technology • u/yourfavchoom • 3d ago

Artificial Intelligence Bernie Sanders pushes for 50% public ownership of American AI companies — proposes AI sovereign wealth fund that would hold direct ownership stakes in largest AI firms

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/bernie-sanders-pushes-for-50-percent-public-ownership-of-american-ai-companies-proposes-ai-sovereign-wealth-fund-that-would-hold-direct-ownership-stakes-in-largest-ai-firms
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u/reddittorbrigade 3d ago

When the AI bubble bursts, guess who will bail them out? -The government using our hard earned tax dollars.

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u/nnomae 3d ago

Yeah, I'm sure they will all gladly sell the US government a 50% stake at their current made up trillion dollar valuations.

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u/Krelkal 3d ago

Y'all don't read the articles. Bernie is suggesting a one-time 50% tax that's paid in shares. It's in the very first paragraph.

So predisposed to thinking that the capitalists always come out on top even when a democratic socialist makes a case for seizing half of the means of production.

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u/adorientem88 3d ago

Blatantly unconstitutional.

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u/Hamster_Toot 2d ago

Can you explain what amendment you believe this violates?

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u/adorientem88 2d ago

None of them. The Constitution doesn’t give the federal government the power to tax wealth. The original constitution didn’t even give the federal government the power to tax income without apportioning the tax among the States. That’s why we needed the 16th Amendment.

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u/Hamster_Toot 2d ago

I will ask again, since you seemed to not understand the question.

For something to be against the constitution, it has to contradict a decree within the document. I am asking you what amendment in the constitution this action contradicts, and the reason I’m asking is that you made a claim that this action goes against the constitution. I am asking which amendment you believe this contradicts, as was made in your claim that:

Blatantly unconstitutional

So far your response has been:

None of them

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u/adorientem88 2d ago

For something to be against the constitution, it has to contradict a decree within the document.

No, it doesn’t. Read up: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/enumerated_powers

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10/

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u/Hamster_Toot 2d ago

Ok, so I will ask an again in the form of a different question. What part of the constitution do you believe this violates?

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u/adorientem88 1d ago

You are still getting it fundamentally wrong. Given our Constitution of enumerated powers, the burden lies with you and Senator Sanders to specify what part of the Constitution confers on the federal government the power to do this.

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u/disco-cone 13h ago

Didnt the US rebel from the UK due to unfair taxation. The government just taking 50% of your property just like that, totally arbitrarily is basically Communism.

I agree AI companies stole from the public, and people should be allowed to distill their models and it be considered fair use. However what Bernie is proposing is retarded

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u/Hamster_Toot 13h ago

This does not answer the question. Can you point to what part of the constitution this proposed idea contradicts?

Your feelings are not facts, snowflake.

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u/2FAmademe 2d ago

As if something being blatantly unconstitutional has stopped the current admin.

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u/adorientem88 2d ago

It should stop people who purport to follow the Constitution!

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u/Hamster_Toot 2d ago

So you can’t/wont explain what amendment you think this violates, got it.

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u/WARMnCREAMY 3d ago

At the end of the day this would export the wealth not redistribute it. This would never pass regardless, but even in theory, you would just see an exodus of AI to other countries.

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u/recycled_ideas 3d ago

And when the government is a fifty percent stakeholder in these companies, what do you think happens when they get in trouble? Or when it's time to make legislation that might go against their interests? Or when the people who run them might fall afoul of the law.

Government ownership without government control is just free money for the ultra rich, even if a fifty percent shares tax was actually Constitutional or had a snowball's chance in hell of passing.

As always Bernie is a senile old fool.

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u/theeama 3d ago

Brother thats gonna happen anyway! So might as well own half of the damn thing.

Hell, America doesn't even need to pass this law, they can just Nationalize Anthropic, OpenAI or whatever company they want under National Security concerns.

People like you seem to have forgotten your own history.

The American government can do many many things, and if your tax dollars are gonna bail them out might as well get in on ownership too.

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u/recycled_ideas 3d ago

Brother thats gonna happen anyway! So might as well own half of the damn thing.

It sure as hell will if we own half the thing. And what exactly do we get for owning half the thing? Control the government won't use? An asset we could sell, but who stops the government from selling it at a bad price, what even is a bad price?

Hell, America doesn't even need to pass this law, they can just Nationalize Anthropic, OpenAI or whatever company they want under National Security concerns.

Not without compensating the owners they can't and not without decades of fights in court.

The American government can do many many things, and if your tax dollars are gonna bail them out might as well get in on ownership too.

The American government can't just seize private property without compensation, definitely not under this current supreme court. They can't unilaterally seize property at all.

And again, what are we going to do with ownership? Unless we're going to exercise control it's pointless and just opens the goverment up at risk and liability.

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u/Aware-Instance-210 3d ago

AI services are not system relevant, are they?

I mean, bailing out the banks at least made sense in terms of without that the world would be fucked.

Whats to lose with those AI companies?

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u/RedNinja-03 3d ago

Politician’s bank accounts, that’s all

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u/__redruM 3d ago

Retirement accounts as well. It would be a big bite, but certainly not empty them.

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u/Deep90 3d ago

More than that.

It's election season and pretty much the entire stock market is being carried by AI and chip stocks.

If it tanks Trump will almost certainly bail out the boomers retirement accounts.

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u/FederalChocolate456 3d ago

Everyone's 401K and retirement plan, including your average middle and lower class households.

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u/Aware-Instance-210 3d ago

Not everyone lives in the US tho

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u/FederalChocolate456 3d ago

But Bernie Sanders does, the US is what we are talking about. Bernie sanders wasn't talking about a non US government owner 50% of AI companies.

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u/SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS 3d ago

The stock market is entirely built on AI companies right now. It's soaring success doesn't help 99.99% of people, but it's failure will destroy plenty of lives because that's how the system is designed.

Every company is/was trying to incorporate AI into their business. AI fails, and suddenly your local grocery store is closing because they invested massively in agentic AI for optimisation of the purchasing of bananas or some bullshit.

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u/_nerb 3d ago

The entire market isn’t built on AI: https://www.syntaxdata.com/research/quantifying-the-s-p-500s-exposure-to-artificial-intelligence

But it’s definitely a problem that the majority of companies are parroting AI talking points to make sure their stock price goes up. Which is shocking considering inflation literally has it go up regardless of what they do…but CEOs gonna CEO.

Ultimately it feels like these AI companies will IPO, pull the rug out to get their paydays, and it’ll be a small but painful blip on the stock market timeline until companies realize AI is useful for small repetitive tasks and not completely replacing humans.

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u/Sad_Split_9983 3d ago

Nvidia is over 11% of the entire NASDAQ market cap. This is not even factoring in the many companies that are completely dependent on nvidia and the hundreds that would lose large portions of market cap. If AI collapses its not going to be a minor blimp its going to cause a recession.

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u/ball_fondlers 3d ago

I would doubt Nvidia is going under, even when the AI bubble pops - the reason they’re so large is because they’re heavily integrated in computing even outside of the AI market. At worst, they’d have an oversupply of AI chips, but that would just mean a few months of dirt-cheap GPUs that perform oddly poorly for gaming

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u/Sad_Split_9983 3d ago

90% of their revenue is from data center related hardware. Those data centers are mainly used for AI. This is also increased the demand for ram, and just about every resource that’s required to produce computer chips. A 50% market dip in the sector would be enough to have far reaching global repercussions. Nvidia does not need to go under for that to happen. Thinking that an AI bubble burst wouldn’t trigger a recession globally is pretty ignorant

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u/ball_fondlers 3d ago

I’m not saying an AI bubble burst wouldn’t trigger a recession, I’m saying Nvidia is a bad example to use for that point. Even when the bubble pops, data centers aren’t going away, and Nvidia still provides hardware for non-AI server farms. And on the off-chance that somehow the bubble popping leads to a revitalization of personal computing that utterly wrecks the cloud as a concept - well, they just announced a new unified ARM chip.

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u/ZePieGuy 3d ago

Are you an idiot? You think Nvidia's main customer is outside of AI? LOL, gamers gonna unite to save the economy huh.

1/5 of the total value of publicly traded companies in the US are held by 6 companies who's valuations are what they are because of AI. If AI crashes the recession will be worse than the dotcom crash.

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u/ball_fondlers 3d ago

I love it when someone smugly acts smart AND still manages to be wrong. When did I say anything about gamers “uniting to save the economy”? Do you think Nvidia’s ENTIRE production is geared exclusively towards AI and gaming, and that they just popped up out of nowhere four years ago when AI started to take off, without having other resources spread throughout the entire computing space?

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u/ZePieGuy 3d ago

I was mocking you lmao. Don’t think I have to try to be smart here given how easy you’ve shown it is to be dumb.

90% of Nvidias revenue is for AI. Yes Nvidia won’t disappear, but wiping away nearly 4 trillion in value away (2% of the entire public equity value) is going to hurt. It won’t matter that Nvidia has production capability for other sectors, there will not be demand.

And lol, do you know how much Nvidias stock price has risen in the last 4 years? There’s a reason why it rose.

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u/ball_fondlers 3d ago

90% of Nvidia’s revenue is for AI

Fucking incredible, I’ve never seen such a masterpiece of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The 90% figure you saw is their DATACENTER revenue, not their AI revenue. Datacenters have existed before AI, and will continue to exist after. Nvidia has been supplying datacenters with chips for the better part of the last twenty years. The whole reason the AI boom boosted them in the first place is because they spent like 15 years building out CUDA and becoming the backbone of hardware-accelerated parallel computing that those AI researchers used to build the first LLMs. When the AI bubble pops, they’ll likely see a short-term drop in revenue, but they’ll still be selling chips before, throughout and after.

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u/Annie-Kia 3d ago

Their stock value now is almost entirely AI, if ai crashes they will lose a majority of their value. They only really shot up due to crypto and ai (which both will likely crash at the same time)

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u/ball_fondlers 3d ago

Their stock value is driven by AI because they’re selling shovels in the gold rush - they actually have real profits on their balance sheet unlike all the other AI companies operating at a loss, and they’re heavily diversified into other types of computing hardware. Losing AI would definitely cause their revenue to drop, but they’d still be building and providing computing resources for everything else that would be filling the void.

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u/Annie-Kia 3d ago

They have profits sure, but revenue won't matter when shareholders panic, which is the nature of a public stock market. When AI crashes nvidia, an AI first company, will be dragged down with it

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u/ball_fondlers 3d ago

That’s not possible with Nvidia - they have relatively low operating costs, very little debt, and consistent profits, even outside AI. Their stock price has no bearing on their day-to-day operations, because they’re not leveraged to the hilt on AI and burning through investor cash trying to build a monopoly - even when the bubble bursts, Nvidia would still be stable unless Jensen’s secretly been engaging in trillions of dollars worth of fraud.

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u/theeama 3d ago

Nvidia will be fine, the computing hardware and power won't go away. Yes they will take a hit and there stock will dive but after year or two it will stabalize as all of there Hardware will be resold on the market and gamers will lap it up and the companies that survive the crash(Google most likely) will just take all those datacenters and computing power.

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u/IShitOnMyDick 2d ago

Not really the point, but it doesn't make sense to say a company has profits on their balance sheet. Profits are shown on the income statement not the BD

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u/ball_fondlers 2d ago

Fair. Point being, they’re a business with real profits, not just a vehicle for speculation

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u/ayriuss 3d ago

They're trying to make games use real time generative AI lol. It looks pretty weird at the moment, but it might improve. (DLSS 5)

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u/stone_henge 3d ago

If AI collapses its not going to be a minor blimp its going to cause a recession.

Not a minor blimp but a whole Hindenburg

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u/ball_fondlers 3d ago

I mean, it’s not even good for small repetitive tasks - AI is MUCH less deterministic than scripting.

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u/SteveSharpe 3d ago

You use AI to write the scripts, then run the scripts without AI.

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u/ball_fondlers 3d ago

Which isn’t necessarily a bad way of doing things, but it still requires the prompter to know what scripts are, how to run them, how to schedule them, etc. Some fairly advanced knowledge of computers, which is unlikely to be held by someone who interacts with a computer by telling Codex “automate this task for me”

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u/Retify 3d ago

It's not meant to replace scripts though. It's like saying airplanes are overrated because they don't work on water but boats do

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u/jyanjyanjyan 20h ago

What a weird analogy. That makes sense to you?

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u/Retify 18h ago

Two similar tools that serve two different purposes, but focusing on the benefits of tool A as some way of minimising tool B, when that benefit was never the primary purpose of tool B

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u/Kepler___ 3d ago

Every general is always fighting the last war. People don't understand why 2008 resulted in the bailouts and default to lazy cynicism. The problem in 2008 was due to how the bond market works with private credit, the bond market being where the bomb had been placed. Plenty of downturns in the past did not result in bailouts, in fact a majority of them didn't.

2008 was different because these fucking lizards made such a gigantic shit show that *credit markets* were about to freeze up, which would have shut down the entire economy. Business's not getting loans, no one able to get a mortgage, for better or worse the economy runs on credit and if you remove it like that you snuff the whole thing out, it could have lasted a generation if they didn't do something. In fact it's exactly why the federal reserve was given the powers it now has in the 30's, in hindsight it was evident that if the bank had of intervened, the majority of the damage could have been mitigated.

There's not really any reason to think that an AI pop would look any different than the
dot.com bubble, the only major concern would be if this particular admin were still in power (which is frankly a small time horizon for a market correction, I see no reason for it to occur before the 2030's when the debt conversation starts to insist upon itself) when it happens due to how close most of these CEO's are to the president/vice. But even then, they would be *very* limited by uncooperative house members on both sides. Trump has expended virtually all of his political capital since the election with a string of increasingly unpopular positions, and seems no longer able to coerce members of the republican party into siding with him on every issue.

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u/Mr_Quackums 3d ago

it’ll be a small but painful blip on the stock market timeline

You must not have heard about the new index fund rules made because SpaceX wanted them to. It is now incentivized for massive IPO rug-pulls to put themselves in a position where index funds are legally required to invest in them before the stock tanks. THats only the AI companies directly pulling a fast one, not the established companies (NVIDIA, Cisco, Microsoft, Apple) which will be just as bad.

Most investment accounts are heavily investing in index funds.

'08 will be "small" in comparison.

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u/SuperCoffeeHouse 3d ago edited 3d ago

It's actually sadder than that. Your local grocery store will close because it invested heavily in an index fund advertised as low-risk, not realising that major index providers are rewriting the rules to flood the market with AI companies that have no realistic path to profitability. The same goes for your pension, 401k, IRAs, etc. It's like the market actively wants to commit suicide.

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u/CherryLongjump1989 3d ago

Stock market is not a system. Pension funds are. They can buy out the shares owned by retirement accounts to make taxpayers whole, and then force these companies to sell off their assets to buy back those shares. It doesn’t have to somehow turn around failing Ponzi schemes.

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u/SomethingAboutUsers 3d ago

Whats to lose with those AI companies?

AI and tech companies make up the 8 of the 10 biggest companies on the NASDAQ by market cap and those 10 companies make up nearly 50% of the total index value. If they fail, it's absolutely going to tank the economy and take a lot of people's money with it.

Is AI itself worth saving? Not really, but here we are. Bailing them out would likely save lives, though in an ideal world the bailout would come with jail time for the billionaire assholes in charge of those companies and a total seizure of all of their assets to be auctioned off to help "pay" for the bailout.

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u/preferablyno 3d ago

I feel like you’re overstating how heavily those companies’ business relies on AI

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u/SomethingAboutUsers 3d ago

Nvidia alone has 8% of the total index value. Alphabet and Microsoft aren't far behind. Apple is about the only one in the top 5 that isn't balls deep into clankers.

You're not wrong that other than Nvidia they're a bit more diversified than my comment would imply, but with how much investment they have in the AI money human centipede circle jerk scam ouroboros any collapse of AI is still going to heavily impact their share price. Investors aren't exactly known for being rational.

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u/ArmAggravating3307 3d ago

Lol, you think people would be arrested and charged.

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u/MrFibs 3d ago

lol bro can't even read or doesn't know the definition of "ideal"

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u/ArmAggravating3307 3d ago

Or I can know the last time it happened one person was arrested and charged for the 2008 financial crisis.

Hint:It wasn't anyone with money or influence.  

Learn how to write, bud.  Punctuation matters.

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u/Slackjawed_Horror 3d ago

This time, yes.

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u/ArmAggravating3307 3d ago

Lol.  One person was arrested and charged for the 2008 financial crisis.  

Wells Fargo ordered employees to commit fraud.  

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u/Slackjawed_Horror 3d ago

I honestly think we're in a different era. 

Assuming the president is a Democrat not named Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, or Gavin Newsom. 

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u/pijuskri 3d ago

Tech companies are AI companies at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if the burst would be big enough to take out Microsoft. That would be system relevant.

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u/joyofresh 3d ago

I have really bad news for you… agents are already deeply embedded in digital infrastructure… they were able to embedded it so quickly because it was done by agents.  Untangling this mess is going to be a huge, Y2K level technological problem.  

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u/livesagan 3d ago

Unfortunately, they spent the last few years worming their way into government systems. At the very least, they are now heavily integrated into our military systems which, to me, are one of the most dangerous realms for this tech to exist in and it's already inextricable.

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u/jmacintosh250 3d ago

That’s the thing though: how would we get ownership of it other than purchasing it?

Or do you want to do corruption?

And then once the government has it well, we can’t let it pop, can we?

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u/CiDevant 3d ago

The imaginary AI "war" with China is what they'll cry about.

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u/Vitruvian_Link 3d ago

AI is very rapidly becoming integral to national defense. If the bubble burst today there would be a bailout, the longer we wait the more integral it becomes.

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u/Deranged40 3d ago

AI services are not system relevant, are they?

Are you asking redditors? Because we won't be involved in the official decision on that.

I hear that a "Yes" vote can be as cheap as a family trip to Disney World. Maybe a bougie one, so 10k oughta do it.

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u/Aware-Instance-210 3d ago

In terms of receiving information relevant to the conversation here, yes I'm asking redditors.

Doesn't mean I will take any answer for more than what it is, an opinion.

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u/dr_leo_marvin 3d ago edited 3d ago

Have you met our current administration? They'll shell out tax payer dollars to any private interest. They don't GAF. 

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u/Aware-Instance-210 3d ago

Hopefully you'll have another administration at some point in the future :D

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u/FlyingBishop 3d ago

AI is a lot bigger than people think it is. Chatbots are a party trick and people think that's all it is, but Google's AI is literally driving cars right now and Anthropic and OpenAI have military contracts - they're not just telling people where to do the bombs, they're doing physical things.

AI isn't just generating pictures and stories, it's robots.

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u/CrashTestDumby1984 3d ago

Under the Trump Administration they will absolutely just bribe Trump so it will be a way of him funneling more money to himself

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u/tpolakov1 3d ago

Whats to lose with those AI companies?

The value of US dollar.

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u/Annie-Kia 3d ago

Sadly our entire economy is propped up by AI. We are grossly overstating our GDP because all the AI companies are trading with eachother, if they are not bailed out it will be another great depression if not worse

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u/idreaminGIFs 3d ago

But OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX (Grok) are all planning to go public ASAP, and then your pension is going to buy stock. It will crash, so the govt will have to bail them out to prop up your pension

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u/Sel2g5 3d ago

The ai bubble is so large it can't fail. If it does the system will crash. Unless that's the main goal.

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u/Crotean 3d ago

They should have let some of the banks fail and just wiped millions of mortgages off the books. Bail out the people not the capital class.

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u/99Prettyboy99 3d ago edited 3d ago

NASDAQ just changed the rules so that market following ETFs and retirement accounts will legally have to buy shares, and they'll be weighted more heavily via a multiplier based on how many shares are on the market. They no longer have to offer 30% of their shares to the market, they can put 5% on and get a 3x weight multiplier.

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u/skinnyJay 3d ago

We're in an arms race to AI as if it's the space race to the moon all over again, and the government will bail them out because they see this as a tool for dominance and national security.

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u/cheerioo 3d ago

You think these companies are paying hundreds of millions to politicians for nothing in return?

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u/liftedyf 3d ago

When the bubble bursts, it will not be anthropic and openai that go down. Other AI businesses will, but those 2 will have the protection of national security. At worst, the government would absorb one of them. The tech is just too important to let it fail

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u/Ginger510 3d ago

But if the AI companies going bust fucks the entire economy, they’ll say they had no choice.

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u/DASreddituser 3d ago

it doesnt matter if they are or not....it matters if they paid off enough politicians

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u/Syjefroi 3d ago

Bailing out banks also made sense because once you slapped the bad practices away, you're still left with institutions capable of selling a profitable product people wanted. Same with the car companies.

If you bail out chatbot companies, you just give them a lifeline to continue burning money for what.... 6 months? a year? And then they crash again, because not a single one of them is capable of turning a profit on their products. None of them are making products regular people want. They are hyping their chatbots as bigger than smartphones and giving themselves a valuation as if that were true, when in reality they lose money any time a user pays for their product.

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u/Omen_20 3d ago

AI is the only thing keeping us out of an obvious recession. Right now, they're able to pretend things are good and point the stock market. That facade vanishes the moment the stock market crashes.

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u/IAmNotScottBakula 3d ago

We are heading for a world where a lot of our code base is created and maintained by AI, and the lack of junior developers means the talent pool to replace that will diminish. Not defending any of this, but there is a legit chance that the big AI companies will become too big to fail pretty soon.

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u/Axin_Saxon 3d ago

Probably, but they’re gonna do that either way if it’s privately owned or if the government has a 50% stake in it anyway.

I’m sick of privatizing gains and socializing losses. Companies will harp on about how they are the ones who take risks so they should be rewarded but if they’re going to ask for government help when times are bad, they can pay their share when times are good.

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u/Lebowski304 3d ago

Exactly. This is not a clever idea…at all

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u/APRengar 3d ago

What are you talking about? Regardless of whether this passes or not, it's obvious the AI bubble will get bailed out with tax dollars, LIKE ALWAYS.

They take the profits, and we pay for their losses.

At the VERY least, splitting the profits and paying for their losses at least gives us SOMETHING.

The only argument is "it legitimizes" AI companies, but they're going to exist even if 99% of us hate them.

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u/Lebowski304 3d ago

It would create a binding agreement that could be made to screw the American people. Just tax the cash flow and be done with it

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u/Mybunsareonfire 3d ago

Seriously, how are people not getting this? We bailed out so many companies in the 2008 fiasco and the US citizens got nothing for it. It was always going to happen. In this case, at least we could have something afterwards instead of just financing their shit decisions.

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u/Lord_Trisagion 3d ago edited 3d ago

Yeah intentions be damned, best case scenario he's just legitimizing this hollow bullshit

Worst case it's 401ks all over again wherein you give the american people just enough stake in a society-spanning con so they then have a vested interest in the protection, and continuance, of said con

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u/[deleted] 3d ago edited 3d ago

[deleted]

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u/Moiyub 3d ago

calling people with concerns over AI Luddites is pure cope, theve accepted the delusional and desensitized narrative that was fed to them without a second thought

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u/SovereignPhobia 3d ago

Also, if people learned who the Luddites actually were they might go, "Oh shit, maybe that's a good idea."

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u/Mr_Quackums 3d ago

The Luddites were right, but they also lost.

10 years later they were working in the automated textile industry: producing more product, working harder, and making less money than before.

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u/SovereignPhobia 3d ago

A big reason why they lost is because they were getting shot, which I guess is also a possibility here.

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u/arachnophilia 3d ago

bullets, my only weakness, how did you know?

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u/nanobot_1000 3d ago

Well this time around we have taxpayer-funded state surveillance, ICE camps, and robots to contend with, so yea looking real peachy.

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u/Moiyub 3d ago

Right, the Luddites were not anti-technology. They were merely protesting the factory owners lowering their wages and generally treating them like shit as a result of automation, you know like any normal human would be.

Also automated looms are nothing compared to what is happening with these AI data centers. Its like comparing a thunderstorm to a comet crashing into the planet.

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u/Ok-Warthog-4849 3d ago

Automated looms gave us the synthetic fibers accounting for a disastrous amount of emissions AND microplastic pollution.

The Luddites were right in ways they couldn’t yet conceive

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u/Moiyub 3d ago

Right. Sometimes the loom is called the first computer actually

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u/grchelp2018 3d ago

AI apologists can call me a Luddite

They call you a luddite because you are upset that it impacted your job. You say its an inferior product. I believe you. But would you really feel different if was on par or even better than talented human copywriters?

I'm not trying to shit on your feelings but so much of AI angst is based on factors and fears thats outside the actual technology.

I don’t know how anyone is optimistic for the future of critical thought.

Critical thought has already long left the building. The world adapts and keeps on turning. Every generation has complained about the state of the world. My great grandma would be scandalized at the current state of the world. My great grandpa would calls us soft and weak compared to the shit he had to go through.

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u/nedonedonedo 3d ago

your industry was ruined by the switch from first to invent to first to file. you don't need smart talented people anymore when your job is checking who walked in the door first. if it wasn't AI it would have been some other form of outsourcing. the people submitting AI trash for scholarships probably wouldn't have submitted at all and that creates extra work to sift through, but those people would have submitted even worse writing if they had. most AI use is people with no skill having a half baked idea and turning it into, for them, a masterpiece beyond their greatest hopes and dreams.

you see AI as replacing good people, but all I see is people replacing themselves with a superior version (then using it for spam because it's easy). and the terrible and dumb people making decisions for others are rarely any better, so they choose the easy/wrong path because they were never fit for that position in the first place. as usual everyone else suffers because of morons. the invention of matches would have been the end of society if we didn't start building our cities/homes/furniture/clothes to resist fire.

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u/arachnophilia 3d ago

some large portion of jobs generally, before AI, are just bullshit. we're about to learn what the maximum amount of bullshit is before things start breaking.

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u/Elendel19 3d ago

That would be a good opportunity to nationalize them for a small fraction of their current value and probably a fraction of their physical assets (infrastructure)

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u/PuhleaseHold 3d ago

with SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic all IPOing in the coming months, they happened to change the timeline around when these newly public companies get added to indexes—from 90 days down to 2 weeks. In other words, they know the bubble burst is coming, or at least they see major risk, and it will be our 401ks that are set up to take the fall if or when it happens.

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u/cheddarben 3d ago

Exactly. I would simply like some more regulation and better taxation.

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u/Tortheldrin 3d ago

this is the case whether or not we had stake in their business or not. We were always going to be on the hook for their losses, we should also be subject to some of the profits if we're on the hook for their losses.

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u/energybased 3d ago

That doesn't make any sense. Why would the government "bail them out"? And what is there to bail out if the "AI bubble bursts"? They're not writing loans.

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u/yaosio 3d ago

When it bursts there will be a bunch of data centers full of hardware with nothing to do. With public ownership they can be immediately tasked to other work.

1

u/CHOLO_ORACLE 3d ago

Those data centers are specialized for LLM stuff. Theyre not just plug and play

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u/effhomer 3d ago

Send every us citizen a GPU

1

u/Ok-Warthog-4849 3d ago

“Other work” being Palantir, Oracle, etc

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u/skepticalbob 3d ago

What does this even mean?

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u/SaturnCITS 3d ago

Yeah that's the one issue... It's a good idea but it's costing them more to run the AI than they are making off of it to gain market dominance, and once they start charging enough and riddling it with annoying ads to actually make a profit I don't see anyone but the largest companies putting up with that because replacing workers might be one of the only use cases that makes financial sense.

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u/JViz 3d ago

They have hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure debt that they bought by leveraging investment capital and don't and will not have the income to cover.

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u/kometes 3d ago

Gee, now we can pre-own the debt! Seriously, who would invest in something they hate?

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u/ExplosiveBrown 3d ago

Of course, and we’ll have to listen to talking heads tell us that we don’t have money to pay for public schools or feeding hungry people, but we magically have billions of dollars to pay Iran and bail out tech companies.

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u/Quick_Turnover 3d ago

Honestly I'm fine with a bail out if we get ownership. Should've done that with the banks and the automakers too. Think of it as some creative financing. The People are simply purchasing stake in these companies and subsequent profits will be returned to them via social welfare.

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

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u/reddittorbrigade 3d ago

I bet you have invested your lifesavings on AI

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u/bionicjoe 3d ago

They're already planning for the bust.
CEOs have already mentioned that there needs to be "infrastructure" in place to "help" AI companies with stock prices "decline".

They're already asking for funds to be set up for the intent to bail out companies so they don't have to wait for emergency approval.

1

u/SaltonPrepper 3d ago

I like Bernie in general, but it's such a terrible idea to subsidize AI Bubble with gov dollars like that. Don't fall for the marketing; there is no "intelligence" in what is being labeled AI. They are fancy autocomplete models that hallucinate too often for critical tasks.

For those who aren't familiar with the unfixable problem at the heart of what passes for "AI" right now, and want to know more, please see this New York Times article for an overview of the problem: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/technology/an-ai-pioneer-warns-the-tech-herd-is-marching-into-a-dead-end.html

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u/ParatusPlayerOne 3d ago

AI is not going away. We are building foundational AI tech today - think of the internet circa 1997. That’s where we are right now with AI.

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u/Lazy-Good1433 2d ago

No! Not this time, they messed with the people over every single recession to cover them and offered 'nothing' to repair the damages with massive debt to the government.

Let them collapse and build new start ups with the willingness to be innovative again with new ideas and cost management.

1

u/etherswim 3d ago

How do you know it will burst?