Summary of why sovereign wealth funds are generally a bad idea: the governments don’t like to do things that could potentially harm their investments. If a government has large stakes in cigarette companies, they’re going to be resistant to regulate them.
There’s also plenty of opportunity for corruption. But even with safeguards, there’s going to be opportunities to steer investment towards favored companies and industries and away from those that oppose the administration or otherwise do things the administration doesn’t like (think of efforts to divest from Israel or fossil fuel companies).
“Just invest in the S&P”. Something like this would give substantial power to the index makers. But it also gives preference to already huge companies. Small, unlisted companies would be indirectly penalized by having to compete against companies with government funding.
In the grand scheme of things, the gov claiming a perpetual 21%+ of all income of AI (all) companies is not all that different from owning a small percent of said AI companies. The financials and even incentives are basically the same.
It's somewhat entertaining to watch both sides argue about this as if it's some major difference when both are actually aligned on wanting bigger gov and more gov ownership/control of corps (one party via taxes the other wants it direct).
That's my point, the gov already owns a ~21% royalty on the income of every company that operates in the US via the corporate tax. And it's more than that if you consider other taxes.
Who is we and what is ownership? Taxes are nice because it's just straight cash, no meddling (other than the myriad of laws they must follow). "Ownership" meaning you want whatever political party/group in power in the moment to able to directly command businesses on top of adding laws and taking money seems a bit like overreach to me, in addition to being costly resource-wise.
We the people who the government represents as a whole, and it can take many forms, yeah, but I am pretty partial to direct ownership of a percentage. The value we provide to these entities deserves it.
> that something gains a lot of power over the institution.
Yeah, that hypothetical is terrifying! It's not like our entire government is in the pocket of the largest of these corporations anyway! That would be an entirely new scenario that we should avoid at all costs!
There are countries where the entire government is the pocket of the largest corporations. The US is not one of those countries. It can get much worse if you allow it.
Just because you have a bee in your car doesn't mean you should ignore the hive growing in the trunk. It's silly to reject all threats because a less severe version of that threat already exists.
I would make the case that government ownership of the machinery of commerce makes both worse. The money and power inherent to this arrangement is corrosive to both sides. Keep them separate and let each fight the other to the proper tension point. If we want revenue there is already a way to do that - we call it taxes
This is theory. If we look at the real world, do sovereign wealth funds typically invest in cigarettes? I don't think so. I think they typically have more stringent ethical guidelines than most regular funds.
I'm typically not in favor of sovereign wealth funds anyway. Because I don't buy the idea that the free market is always more efficient than the public sector, and if that's the case then investing the funds in the public sector, schools and improving health and social outcomes, is better than buying SpaceX even if they're going to the moon.
Of course there are exceptions.. if a country has more money than they know what to do with, it makes sense to pile it.
Its not a sovereign wealth fund, but China 100% owns China Tobacco and has generally avoided policy changes which could encourage people to stop smoking because it could hurt this extremely profitable company (China Tabacco has about 2x the before tax profit of Apple). https://www.theexamination.org/articles/deadliest-company-in...
> the governments don’t like to do things that could potentially harm their investments. If a government has large stakes in cigarette companies, they’re going to be resistant to regulate them.
The ideal in a democracy would be that we behave as adults and make the decision where to draw the lines.
...and yeah, corruption is a problem, but it's going to find a way regardless of what we throw at it. We would be better off handling the existing corruption than worrying about some hypothetical future corruption as a reason we can't try new things.
I think what we’ve found with the current administration is that people will use every last surface for corruption and power that they can. The more you opportunities you give the government to be corrupt, the more corrupt they’re going to be.
Also of note: this is not the first administration to take controversial action. Pretty much every government ever has shown that more power = more corruption.
There's a reason every country with a sovereign wealth fund is a dictatorship, its a really handy way to launder money, steal. Which is why Trump wants it.
To play devils advocate, the fact Norway has a coherent society/population makes it dictatorship of the demos. Which of course is evil since people who refuse to integrate into society aren't allowed to dicate terms.
Consider the OpenAI case of "goblins". The models overfit to a specific type of output. Goblins was a specific case of this type and needed to be corrected.
I'm not saying all of LLMs writing quirks are naturally derived just this one. It's a bit like it's overuse of em-dashes, they're not common in general writing which is why it stood out, but they do show up a fair bit in other types like scientific writing. My wife, who's a chemistry PhD, has bemoaned the association to me that she liked using them in her writing for papers and now it looks like she's using an LLM.
If something becomes a strong negative symbol, it's intelligent to recognize that because failing to do so can harm your goal, e.g. communication.
As an extreme example of this, no one calls it a "Charlie Chaplain moustache" and if you wear one people will avoid you, no matter how much you insist it's just because you like Charlie.
If it was used as sparingly, appropriately, and skillfully in AI writing as in human writing then AI writing wouldn't stand out as so mediocre and cringe.
The specific problem isn't "it's not X, it's Y", it's using that pattern where X and Y are not correctly related categorical items.
Yes, I know how I structured that sentence.
"It's not a frying pan, it's a revolution" sounds like AI. "It's not an octopus, it's some type of crustacean" does not. The thing that makes it an AI tell is specifically FALSE analogy.
I didn't read because of the paywall, so I don't know how good their argument is, but I'm very skeptical about trusting The Financial Times to determine what is and isn't progressive or techno-imperialism.
I can’t read the article. Do they explain how it’s more imperialist than what we have now?
Using capital ownership to distribute the proceeds of an industry whose raw material was the creative output of everyone everywhere … seems like the neatest and most obvious possible solution to AI displacement and provenance. But I can see how it might make a few dozen people less likely to be billionaires.
AI;DR* they want to build data centers in other countries that are less able to resist their construction. This consumes water and electricity of the host county. The central thesis is that if the less-than-willing exploitation of foreign resources for the enrichment of the more powerful country is imperialism, then this is a form of imperialism.
* The clunky turns of phrase and jarring introduction of analogies reads strongly of Claude to me, at least
Thanks. I'm astonished how poorly written and poorly argued the piece is. No discussion or even mention of existing SWFs. Trying to frame SWFs as something leftists should oppose because of… some vague hand-waving about an Edwardian policy?
The purpose of any technology is to expand one's powers, and whatever those powers expand to is conquested. Bronze was imperialist but iron was more imperialist, and gunpowder was more imperialist than that. Oil was even more imperialist and now chips and AI are having a go at it. Even the harnessing of fire and the cultivation of spoken language was imperialist, and a necessary step towards today's AI boom. It's the the latest ring to rule them all.
Interestingly to your example, there seems to be a rough consensus that the bronze age collapse (~12th century BC) was related to the fact that iron production was less centralized than bronze, which required multiple long-distance supply chains that could be monopolized by regional powers. Different folks point the causality in different directions.
Some technologies are inherently more centralizing, some are less so.
I agree that most technologies can be applied for imperialistic interests, and the tech space is full of things that seemed decentralizing and have since been captured, but it's not quite law.
IC manufacturing is basically a modern global palace economy full of shipping and single-player choke points and large capital investments, so it leans hard to the centralizing side.
It's less clear that AI will work that way, if it turns out that it is relatively practical to do useful work on locally hosted models it might end up being somewhat decentralizing.
Or, we'll get technological and/or regulatory capture, end up paying rents to technofeudalist douchebags with data centers and proprietary models who bribe governments and peek at user behavior and try to use their already vast resources to preemptively capture any value before anyone else can, until the next major perturbation.
Well yeah, hard power is a major impetus behind sovereign wealth funds - be they ADIA, Temasek, Master Trust, QIA, PIF, CIC, etc.
But this is the world we live in.
If you put your head in the sand, you become the EU - squeezed by trade wars against China and the US with two large scale conventional wars within your near abroad.
Summary of why sovereign wealth funds are generally a bad idea: the governments don’t like to do things that could potentially harm their investments. If a government has large stakes in cigarette companies, they’re going to be resistant to regulate them.
There’s also plenty of opportunity for corruption. But even with safeguards, there’s going to be opportunities to steer investment towards favored companies and industries and away from those that oppose the administration or otherwise do things the administration doesn’t like (think of efforts to divest from Israel or fossil fuel companies).
“Just invest in the S&P”. Something like this would give substantial power to the index makers. But it also gives preference to already huge companies. Small, unlisted companies would be indirectly penalized by having to compete against companies with government funding.
In the grand scheme of things, the gov claiming a perpetual 21%+ of all income of AI (all) companies is not all that different from owning a small percent of said AI companies. The financials and even incentives are basically the same.
It's somewhat entertaining to watch both sides argue about this as if it's some major difference when both are actually aligned on wanting bigger gov and more gov ownership/control of corps (one party via taxes the other wants it direct).
> the gov claiming a perpetual 21%+ of all income of AI (all) companies is not all that different from owning a small percent of said AI companies
We don’t count reduced taxes as a loss in the same way as losses on equities owned. That changes the electoral incentives.
> gov ownership/control of corps
Corporations are literally government sponsored entities. Where do you think they get their limited liability and separate legal personhood from?
We should own a piece of every single one for that service we provide.
That's my point, the gov already owns a ~21% royalty on the income of every company that operates in the US via the corporate tax. And it's more than that if you consider other taxes.
Good, then we are in agreement that it's already on the table. No reason to avoid making some adjustments rapid iteration style.
Who is we and what is ownership? Taxes are nice because it's just straight cash, no meddling (other than the myriad of laws they must follow). "Ownership" meaning you want whatever political party/group in power in the moment to able to directly command businesses on top of adding laws and taking money seems a bit like overreach to me, in addition to being costly resource-wise.
We the people who the government represents as a whole, and it can take many forms, yeah, but I am pretty partial to direct ownership of a percentage. The value we provide to these entities deserves it.
> but I am pretty partial to direct ownership of a percentage.
What does that look like in practice?
I was thinking we just move fast and break things. A little disruption never hurt anybody. I'm sure we can have all the kinks worked out in 2 years.
Ah so you were just trolling.
That becomes a tail wagging the dog ehh? Fed the one giving them money and the corps tell you what to do. Where does democracy fit in?
As they say, if you owe a million dollars to the bank, the bank owns you. But if you owe a billion dollars to the bank, you own the bank.
When an institution becomes financially dependent on something for its revenues, that something gains a lot of power over the institution.
> that something gains a lot of power over the institution.
Yeah, that hypothetical is terrifying! It's not like our entire government is in the pocket of the largest of these corporations anyway! That would be an entirely new scenario that we should avoid at all costs!
There are countries where the entire government is the pocket of the largest corporations. The US is not one of those countries. It can get much worse if you allow it.
We clearly disagree, but that's ok.
Just because you have a bee in your car doesn't mean you should ignore the hive growing in the trunk. It's silly to reject all threats because a less severe version of that threat already exists.
See, the problem with your analogy is, the way I see it, you are the one ignoring the hive in the trunk.
I would make the case that government ownership of the machinery of commerce makes both worse. The money and power inherent to this arrangement is corrosive to both sides. Keep them separate and let each fight the other to the proper tension point. If we want revenue there is already a way to do that - we call it taxes
This is theory. If we look at the real world, do sovereign wealth funds typically invest in cigarettes? I don't think so. I think they typically have more stringent ethical guidelines than most regular funds.
I'm typically not in favor of sovereign wealth funds anyway. Because I don't buy the idea that the free market is always more efficient than the public sector, and if that's the case then investing the funds in the public sector, schools and improving health and social outcomes, is better than buying SpaceX even if they're going to the moon.
Of course there are exceptions.. if a country has more money than they know what to do with, it makes sense to pile it.
Its not a sovereign wealth fund, but China 100% owns China Tobacco and has generally avoided policy changes which could encourage people to stop smoking because it could hurt this extremely profitable company (China Tabacco has about 2x the before tax profit of Apple). https://www.theexamination.org/articles/deadliest-company-in...
> the governments don’t like to do things that could potentially harm their investments. If a government has large stakes in cigarette companies, they’re going to be resistant to regulate them.
The ideal in a democracy would be that we behave as adults and make the decision where to draw the lines.
...and yeah, corruption is a problem, but it's going to find a way regardless of what we throw at it. We would be better off handling the existing corruption than worrying about some hypothetical future corruption as a reason we can't try new things.
I think what we’ve found with the current administration is that people will use every last surface for corruption and power that they can. The more you opportunities you give the government to be corrupt, the more corrupt they’re going to be.
Also of note: this is not the first administration to take controversial action. Pretty much every government ever has shown that more power = more corruption.
Also of note: this administration has taken corruption to levels not seen before.
I agree, it's hard to let someone get all hand wavy about hypothetical corruption right now. That ship has sailed and is sinking as we speak.
Doesn't need to be the S&P. Can simply be the entire market float market share weighted
That’s still providing an implicit subsidy to listed corporations
There's a reason every country with a sovereign wealth fund is a dictatorship, its a really handy way to launder money, steal. Which is why Trump wants it.
Norway is a dictatorship?
To play devils advocate, the fact Norway has a coherent society/population makes it dictatorship of the demos. Which of course is evil since people who refuse to integrate into society aren't allowed to dicate terms.
One working model versus a dozen others? Kind of like, I didn't wear a seat belt and lived, so guess we don't need them.
> A isn't X – it's Y
It's common in AI writing because it's common in human writing. Juxtaposition is a useful rhetorical flourish.
Only sort of true.
Consider the OpenAI case of "goblins". The models overfit to a specific type of output. Goblins was a specific case of this type and needed to be corrected.
https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
> We unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures. From there, the goblins spread.
I'm not saying all of LLMs writing quirks are naturally derived just this one. It's a bit like it's overuse of em-dashes, they're not common in general writing which is why it stood out, but they do show up a fair bit in other types like scientific writing. My wife, who's a chemistry PhD, has bemoaned the association to me that she liked using them in her writing for papers and now it looks like she's using an LLM.
The joke's on us, today's highly rewarding LLM language tics are tomorrow's vernacular (ALLMVE?)
Fashions change; ideas that look AI-generated are out of fashion right now.
I've never really cared about fashion.
If something becomes a strong negative symbol, it's intelligent to recognize that because failing to do so can harm your goal, e.g. communication.
As an extreme example of this, no one calls it a "Charlie Chaplain moustache" and if you wear one people will avoid you, no matter how much you insist it's just because you like Charlie.
For HN users yea, for everyone else, more information required.
If it was used as sparingly, appropriately, and skillfully in AI writing as in human writing then AI writing wouldn't stand out as so mediocre and cringe.
AI definitely over uses it but it's important to not just see one indicator and assume.
That's true. Distrust of human writing is one of the unavoidable downsides of LLMs that we were warned about.
You can see it too a lot in "debunking" of videos and images. 4 years ago anything unbelievable was CGI now it's all just getting called AI instead.
Isn't it usually "it's not just x, it's y"? As in, it's X but even more than X.
The title has the opposite meaning: it's not X, but it's Y.
Yeah, the subject is AI, so you try to get a crashingly obvious AI trope in there somewhere. Those are the rules.
(Disclaimer: didn't read the article. It's paywalled.)
In general news paper article writers don't pick the title of their own article, it's someone else picking it for engagement (maybe using AI).
Also, FT is too big to not be aware of AI writing, and to not have internal checks (Pangram, ...)
AI speak infects human language now, people start to talk like LLMs.
People already talked like LLMs, how else would they have learned to talk like that?
"It isn't x, its y" was a common device before, AI has just highlighted it's use. Em dashes on the other hand are the devil's work.
The specific problem isn't "it's not X, it's Y", it's using that pattern where X and Y are not correctly related categorical items.
Yes, I know how I structured that sentence.
"It's not a frying pan, it's a revolution" sounds like AI. "It's not an octopus, it's some type of crustacean" does not. The thing that makes it an AI tell is specifically FALSE analogy.
> "It's not a frying pan, it's a revolution" sounds like AI.
This is either hyperbole or it hasn't been re-checked since around 2022.
> A doesn't belong to category X, it belongs to category Y.
FTFY. If you confuse ∈ for =, that's on you.
I didn't read because of the paywall, so I don't know how good their argument is, but I'm very skeptical about trusting The Financial Times to determine what is and isn't progressive or techno-imperialism.
I can’t read the article. Do they explain how it’s more imperialist than what we have now?
Using capital ownership to distribute the proceeds of an industry whose raw material was the creative output of everyone everywhere … seems like the neatest and most obvious possible solution to AI displacement and provenance. But I can see how it might make a few dozen people less likely to be billionaires.
AI;DR* they want to build data centers in other countries that are less able to resist their construction. This consumes water and electricity of the host county. The central thesis is that if the less-than-willing exploitation of foreign resources for the enrichment of the more powerful country is imperialism, then this is a form of imperialism.
* The clunky turns of phrase and jarring introduction of analogies reads strongly of Claude to me, at least
anything that gives US an advantage in any market/competitive arena is basically imperialist.
Gift article - https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/71bd10...
But basically, the argument is that a government shouldn't accrue and own appreciating assets mixed with AI skepticism.
Thanks. I'm astonished how poorly written and poorly argued the piece is. No discussion or even mention of existing SWFs. Trying to frame SWFs as something leftists should oppose because of… some vague hand-waving about an Edwardian policy?
SWFs are a great tool for reducing inequality and influencing corporate governance. see, e.g. https://peoplespolicyproject.org/project/creating-an-alaska-...
He's also been a major ideologue for what became Chat Control [0]
> SWFs are a great tool for reducing inequality
Closer to Europe, Norway and Ireland have also successfully used SWFs and SDFs.
Edit: can't reply
> "Journal of Democracy"
It is a journal just like Nature. This is a paper he published within the journal. Policymakers don't read blogs.
[0] - https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/liberation-techn...
"Journal of Democracy"
> The smartest analysis on democracy and authoritarianism around the world—straight to your inbox every week.
Sounds like a rational and clear-headed individual.
The purpose of any technology is to expand one's powers, and whatever those powers expand to is conquested. Bronze was imperialist but iron was more imperialist, and gunpowder was more imperialist than that. Oil was even more imperialist and now chips and AI are having a go at it. Even the harnessing of fire and the cultivation of spoken language was imperialist, and a necessary step towards today's AI boom. It's the the latest ring to rule them all.
Interestingly to your example, there seems to be a rough consensus that the bronze age collapse (~12th century BC) was related to the fact that iron production was less centralized than bronze, which required multiple long-distance supply chains that could be monopolized by regional powers. Different folks point the causality in different directions.
Some technologies are inherently more centralizing, some are less so.
I agree that most technologies can be applied for imperialistic interests, and the tech space is full of things that seemed decentralizing and have since been captured, but it's not quite law.
IC manufacturing is basically a modern global palace economy full of shipping and single-player choke points and large capital investments, so it leans hard to the centralizing side. It's less clear that AI will work that way, if it turns out that it is relatively practical to do useful work on locally hosted models it might end up being somewhat decentralizing.
Or, we'll get technological and/or regulatory capture, end up paying rents to technofeudalist douchebags with data centers and proprietary models who bribe governments and peek at user behavior and try to use their already vast resources to preemptively capture any value before anyone else can, until the next major perturbation.
Can´t read the article, why is this article still here? Is HN doing ads now, pfff?
Well yeah, hard power is a major impetus behind sovereign wealth funds - be they ADIA, Temasek, Master Trust, QIA, PIF, CIC, etc.
But this is the world we live in.
If you put your head in the sand, you become the EU - squeezed by trade wars against China and the US with two large scale conventional wars within your near abroad.
That paywall is techno imperialism