"Meta is claiming that the costly A.I. computer chips it buys from companies, including Nvidia, are entitled to a taxpayer-provided discount as part of the experiment."
Why do these schemes always involves these private companies siphoning money from taxpayers? It's "communism" (or whatever) to subsidize public health, yet we are expected to subsidize experimental AI companies.
We aren't expected to. We (or our elected representatives) passed a law saying that experimental spending gets tax breaks. And I don't really see an argument that LLMs aren't in an experimental phase.
I'm happy to make that argument. LLMs were experimental in 2023. It's 2026 now, and enormous numbers of people use them on a daily basis (ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users now, according to Sam Altman at OpenAI DevDay).
They're only experimental in the way that computers are still experimental, since we continue to find new ways to use computers.
I mean this is clearly a huge stretch. Presumably the intent of this law is to incentivize novel innovation. In this case we incentivize nothing. Data centers are commodities.
LLMs are not and Llama did pretty much exactly what this type of program encourages. It was a pilot that made no money, was thrown away, and spurred a ton of independent research.
This is also a weird split brain with HN. Half the front page is mocking companies for throwing away money on AI. That Chinese models (which surely got a huge boost from LLaMa) are going to render all this investment a gigantic loss.
Most people don't pick up the bill. Anyone net tax-negative does not pick up the bill. Facebook definitely pays more tax than me, both as a corporation and from all the employees they employ.
But _you_ are tax positive I assume, and therefore are picking up the bill. When FB tax dodges, we incur debt that _you_ will pay for. Perhaps indirectly, but you are paying for it as a taxpayer.
What debt are we incurring? If I stop working and don't pay tax, I didn't rob you. Me paying less tax doesn't rob you. Stupid spending of your taxes on things you don't need or want robs you.
> If I stop working and don't pay tax, I didn't rob you.
Depends if you have income from capital.
> Me paying less tax doesn't rob you.
Depends on the tax code.
> Stupid spending of your taxes on things you don't need or want robs you.
Fair.
The argument comes down to the "fairness" of society. What level of taxation is "fair"? There's probably not a single right answer.
However, there are answers that result somewhat deterministically in rising inequality. So for those of us who don't want to live in a highly inequitable society, there is a "more right" answer.
Now, I'm sure other people (presumably people who are doing well under high inequality) would think the "right answer" is to increase inequality as much as possible.
Personally, I don't think that kind of society would be very nice to live in.
Inequality is not a problem in a world where people can choose to work really hard or chill their whole lives and have the hard workers pay for their food stamps.
The main thing is choice, and that will always result in different outcomes. A violinist will probably end up with less money in her life than a stockbroker ends up in his, but money is not the only measure of a life.
On that measure however, with the massive scale that certain companies can achieve, some people will have far more net worth than others. But that won't be because the others had anything taken from them. It'll be because massive value was supplied to some customers, or some value was supplied to millions of customers.
Why do these schemes always involves these private companies siphoning money from taxpayers? It's "communism" (or whatever) to subsidize public health, yet we are expected to subsidize experimental AI companies.