Public AI as an Alternative to Corporate AI
This mini-essay was my contribution to a round table on Power and Governance in the Age of AI. It’s nothing I haven’t said here before, but for anyone who hasn’t read my longer essays on the topic, it’s a shorter introduction.
The increasingly centralized control of AI is an ominous sign. When tech billionaires and corporations steer AI, we get AI that tends to reflect the interests of tech billionaires and corporations, instead of the public. Given how transformative this technology will be for the world, this is a problem.
To benefit society as a whole we need an AI public option—not to replace corporate AI but to serve as a counterbalance—as well as stronger democratic institutions to govern all of AI. Like public roads and the federal postal system, a public AI option could guarantee universal access to this transformative technology and set an implicit standard that private services must surpass to compete.
Widely available public models and computing infrastructure would yield numerous benefits to the United States and to broader society. They would provide a mechanism for public input and oversight on the critical ethical questions facing AI development, such as whether and how to incorporate copyrighted works in model training, how to distribute access to private users when demand could outstrip cloud computing capacity, and how to license access for sensitive applications ranging from policing to medical use. This would serve as an open platform for innovation, on top of which researchers and small businesses—as well as mega-corporations—could build applications and experiment. Administered by a transparent and accountable agency, a public AI would offer greater guarantees about the availability, equitability, and sustainability of AI technology for all of society than would exclusively private AI development.
Federally funded foundation AI models would be provided as a public service, similar to a health care public option. They would not eliminate opportunities for private foundation models, but they could offer a baseline of price, quality, and ethical development practices that corporate players would have to match or exceed to compete.
The key piece of the ecosystem the government would dictate when creating an AI public option would be the design decisions involved in training and deploying AI foundation models. This is the area where transparency, political oversight, and public participation can, in principle, guarantee more democratically-aligned outcomes than an unregulated private market.
The need for such competent and faithful administration is not unique to AI, and it is not a problem we can look to AI to solve. Serious policymakers from both sides of the aisle should recognize the imperative for public-interested leaders to wrest control of the future of AI from unaccountable corporate titans. We do not need to reinvent our democracy for AI, but we do need to renovate and reinvigorate it to offer an effective alternative to corporate control that could erode our democracy.
JonKnowsNothing • March 21, 2024 9:53 AM
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re: Federally funded foundation AI models would be provided as a public service, similar to a health care public option. They would not eliminate opportunities for private foundation models…
Hmmm hardly know how to explain basic Libertarian-Neocon-Austerity-Hayek economic model on this concept.
In short, this is a non-starter as expressed, especially in the USA. It might fly in China as they have different-better economic policies for such projects, which they label China National Security expenditures.
Health Care in USA, aka Medicare is not Federally funded. It is paid for individually by taxes-fees on working wages during a lifetime. It is set up as an insurance program, where you pay in premiums and at a later date, you collect some portion of the amount marked as Your Individual Contribution.
The USA does not have a single payer Health Care System. Medicare is administered by a Federal Agency, but it is not Federally Funded. Which can be confusing because every budget go-round there is an argument about how much to allocate for Medicare. This argument revolves around how much of the Pension Pool the Government can siphon off for other projects.
In the USA, the Hayek economic model runs the country since ~1970. It is often called Austerity model, which extracts the maximum amount of profit from any enterprise. The government is not permitted to engage in any activity that a private company can do for profit. It’s baked in as the saying goes.
The Government can buy, contract for, order products from the private market place; it cannot produce products that compete or impede private markets.
Zho, to rephrase the concept for the USA