theandrewbailey 1 hour ago

Privatize the losses. These are the largest companies the world has ever seen, sitting on piles of assets like dragons. They have hyped AI endlessly to the point that everyone else is sick of it. If they haven't saved any money, and can't bail themselves out, they deserve bankruptcy.

Signed, the Silent Majority

  • techblueberry 1 hour ago

    Can you privatize the losses if the banks are investing, providing debt to and repackaging that debt into broader instruments?

    I worry that one of the reasons that Anthropic has 500 billion in commitments and everyone is running to the credit markets is to make it so that if they fail everyone suffers.

    • bluGill 1 hour ago

      All the more reason to make them fail. FDIC should pay insurance and otherwise fail the banks. Capitalism cannot work if there isn't feedback that not watching for things like this will hurt you.

      • AnimalMuppet 55 minutes ago

        I actually liked the approach that happened with several large companies in 2008 - the stockholders get wiped out, the senior management is gone, but the depositors get protected.

        • JumpCrisscross 54 minutes ago

          > the stockholders get wiped out, the senior management is gone, but the depositors get protected

          Who are you thinking of?

          That’s what happened in 2023. In 2008, depositors almost got wiped out and a lot of senior managers and stockholders got bailouts.

          • AnimalMuppet 11 minutes ago

            Where did depositors almost get wiped out in 2008?

            At NetBank? Only if they were over the FDIC limit. Stockholders got destroyed, though.

            At Bear Stearns? No, depositors got protected in a convoluted deal. The shareholders got very close to nothing.

            At Lehman Brothers? They did "break the buck" on money market funds for a bit, but weren't depositors made whole? And weren't stock owners wiped out in the bankruptcy?

            Washington Mutual? Depositors were covered by the FDIC.

            Where were depositors "almost wiped out"? Where specifically? Where were stockholders bailed out?

      • JumpCrisscross 54 minutes ago

        > FDIC should pay insurance and otherwise fail the banks

        That’s what happened in 2023.

    • vinyl7 53 minutes ago

      We're due for a recession to wipe out all this irrationality that has been cooking for the last 20 years. I say let it fail.

    • driverdan 45 minutes ago

      Of course. Governments shouldn't be bailing out corporations ever.

      • JumpCrisscross 31 minutes ago

        > Governments shouldn't be bailing out corporations ever

        Ever is a stretch. Government shouldn’t be bailing out shareholders and senior managers.

    • whatthejesus 36 minutes ago

      Anthropic is not going to fail. Claude does amazing things and all the companies built on top of it are more likely to fail because at the end of the day, we can remake their value proposition by using Claude and a few command line tools…

      • theandrewbailey 30 minutes ago

        If Anthropic has made promises that its wallet cannot keep (as it looks like), it will fail. Let me remind you that Anthropic isn't profitable yet, and there's no clear path that it will be.

        • whatthejesus 5 minutes ago

          Okay fair enough. I don’t track the finances just what the tools are doing. And on that all these AI-Ifying documents and stuff doesn’t really have a moat, but Anthropic has a great product.

          Either way the people should never bail out corporations.

    • jerf 35 minutes ago

      Privatizing the losses doesn't mean the rest of us are going to escape without a scratch. It just means that we let fail the things that are going to fail.

      What makes this so politically unpalatable is that having constantly bailed out the last few cycles, everyone is now operating on the assumption that they will be bailed out, so many entities who in a more perfect world would know better have done a lot of stupid things, like pensions that have a lot of bonds that will go bad if the AI bubble collapses.

      Frankly we're looking at massive problems and upheaval at this point no matter what we do. But the advantage of not socializing the losses is that the signals of what needs to be changed go directly into the economy. Socializing the losses means that the signals get muted, confused, and mangled and people in the future end up doing the wrong things as a result.

      Unfortunately, at this point I think the choice is between people clearly and forthrightly losing massive portions of their retirement as visible losses, or people deceptively losing massive portions of their retirement as the bailout creates massive inflation and their retirement is inflated until it has a fairly similar amount of losses. Unfortunately, it is a feature for the rulers that the bailouts obscure the losses and dampen the correct apportionment of blame, even as it destroys the underlying economy. Giving people clear, correct targets for their rage, the same process of correct pain apportionment the economy needs to become healthy again, would point people at the "wrong" clear, correct targets, and the clear, correct targets are the ones deciding whether or not a bailout occurs. Not just the literal lawmakers nominally making the call, but the entire system that makes the decision.

      So plan on bailouts.

      • foobarian 4 minutes ago

        I remember the prevailing opinion in 2008 was that not bailing out would have caused much worse problems. We'll never know I guess

    • slowin 4 minutes ago

      If they can't privatize the loses, they should definitely not be allowed to privatize the gains. AI should be a public utility and be required to open source their models.

  • bryanlarsen 56 minutes ago

    Need to update the aphorism:

    If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem. If you owe the bank $100 billion, that's country's problem.

    • etempleton 43 minutes ago

      Fortunately, they do not owe the banks as much as they owe each other and private capital.

      • aeon_ai 32 minutes ago

        I've got news for you on how the economy works.

        • yifanl 18 minutes ago

          Well don't leave us hanging, what's the news?

          • totetsu 3 minutes ago

            They borrow the banks money to owe to each other?

        • cicko 8 minutes ago

          Pyramid scheme?

    • eloisius 11 minutes ago

      If it’s the country’s problem, then nationalize them. Not loans, not bail outs. Confiscate and figure out how to wind them down in a way that benefits the taxpayers.

      • rtkwe 9 minutes ago

        Didn't even have to wind them down to benefit in some cases. I can't remember if it was the automaker or some of the 08 bank bailouts where the stock the government took as part of the bailout turned a profit after a few years.

    • iAMkenough 9 minutes ago

      Sucks that most of the country didn’t vote for the $100 billion, but will be left holding the bag. Are we witnessing the fall of an empire?

      • DFHippie 7 minutes ago

        That's an evergreen template.

    • dingaling911 6 minutes ago

      Trump admin, to their credit, seem to have somehow figured this out.

      They bailed out Intel and the stock recovered.

      Might do the same.

      • lemoncookiechip 2 minutes ago

        Bad new for you, their stock fell -29%, the largest collapse since the 70s. It's nearly back to last years' level.

  • woodpanel 46 minutes ago

    > Privatize the losses

    Isn't that what the IPOs are for?

    • tovej 31 minutes ago

      The IPOs are for "socializing" the losses, in the sense that the losses are dumped on retail investors, who are the general populace. Especially if you consider big pension funds

  • Telemakhos 22 minutes ago

    Nobody who has ever run a business or knows about how a business runs would think that any business "sits on piles of assets like dragons." Very little cash sits idle, usually for anticipated operational expenditures with a reserve for unanticipated expenditures; the rest is invested, loaned, spent on building the business, or returned to investors. If OpenAI is holding $25 billion in cash, it's because they anticipate spending that much in the near future, not because they're sleeping atop it in a mountain cave.

    • thesmtsolver2 18 minutes ago

      Next you will be telling me the rich don’t have a vault of gold coins you can swim in like Scrooge McDuck!

      • 4chandaily 10 minutes ago

        I was so terribly sad to learn that gold is much more dense than a duck, and thus Scrooge would have certainly floated on top of his pool of coins. My childhood was ruined.

        Now that I think about it, it would seem this may also apply to witches.

    • zardo 18 minutes ago

      In this case, companies actually do have large inventories of GPUs they bought before they had datacenters to install them in.

    • Iolaum 16 minutes ago

      He didn't say cash, he said assets.

      Also funny enough - AAPL is siting on 62B$ cash according to google search.

    • braiamp 12 minutes ago

      In this particular case and with these particular companies... yes, they were sitting in a hoard of cash like dragons. They literally didn't know what to do with it, so they gambled on The Next Big Thing™....

      Either way, it's more efficient to give whatever money to bail out individuals/consumers than to bail out rent seeking organizations

  • JumpCrisscross 5 minutes ago

    What we need is a revocation of the Exchange Stabilisation Fund [1] and hard limits on the Defense Production Act Title III and whatever the fuck let the President unilaterally invest taxpayer money in Intel (e.g. amending the CHIPS Act).

    This, a non-binding resolution, does none of that.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Stabilization_Fund

bushido 23 minutes ago

A lot of comments read this is as fluff. And in some ways it is.

However, looking at the other side, I think what this might do is add some barrier or consideration when a bailout is considered.

The last time we did large scale bailouts (TARP[0], in 2008), It was rushed through and ratified in around two weeks following the sudden collapse of Lehman.

Any measures we can take to ensure that we don't fall into a situation where there is only one choice is sensible.

[0] https://home.treasury.gov/data/troubled-assets-relief-progra...

  • JumpCrisscross 10 minutes ago

    > what this might do is add some barrier or consideration when a bailout is considered

    It’s a resolution. Pure puffery. A serious effort would have involved floating a bill.

Sol- 1 hour ago

Is there any indication that such a bailout was even planned or is this just populist tilting at windmills?

  • apercu 1 hour ago

    The investment to date has been ridiculous and undisciplined. It’s very hard to understand the valuations of these companies. If this wasn’t an election year I think there would be more oversight and critical review. But we have a very unserious party in charge right now.

    It’s good that it’s being discussed. We’re tired of the wealth class privatizing the profits and leaving us to cover the costs.

  • Forgeties79 1 hour ago

    Then the bill will never become relevant and it’ll just be a waste of time and you can laugh at it in hindsight. And I’m sure none of these companies will lobby against it, since it’s just tilting at windmills and won’t mean anything.

  • asjfhgw 58 minutes ago

    David Sacks has been a bit sidelined by the regime, but he was the one lobbying for the bailout of Silicon Valley Bank (under the Democrats!).

    So there will be a huge pressure. Trump Jr. and the Kushners are invested in all sorts of bubbly assets, too.

    The Democrats should do this however, and if they win the midterms keep their promises for once and block everything. Then 2028 is easy.

    • buellerbueller 36 minutes ago

      I agree with much of your sentiment, but if the lack of bailout (which let me reiterate, I agree with) leads to a recession, it will kill the D chances in 2028. They will apply this calculus to their political behavior, and (as is typical for the Ds) will do nothing.

      Promises in the wind.

    • retwakm3 34 minutes ago

      The Democrats I suspect are planning on doing the exact opposite unfortunately. They were very wimpy on the bubbly ai stuff under Biden, why would they change when they don't get punished from their own constituents for going against their promises. Same party apparatus as a whole that existed under Kamala. We need a Trump style clean out of the Democratic party because the brand is as bad as the Republican brand at this point. I can't with surity say that the Democrats are going to do anything to reign in big tech, all I can hope for is that they will be slightly better than trump or if not that, no worse.

  • AnimalMuppet 56 minutes ago

    There are almost certainly bank execs who are looking at Anthropic's IPO and thinking "if it crashes, we'll get bailed out". Saying "no you won't" now, before the IPO, when it has a chance to affect peoples' behavior, is a worthwhile thing to do.

  • jelloroll42 56 minutes ago

    It's just convention at this point in the 21st century. No indication of a plan is needed when it's the only outcome to be expected.

  • JumpCrisscross 55 minutes ago

    It’s a resolution, so pure fluff. That said, a prohibition on bailing out this sector in particular might make it possible to claw back anything this regime illegally gives.

  • etempleton 42 minutes ago

    It is preemptive. Everyone can see the bubble and these companies are barrelling forwarding anyway. It is reckless and irresponsible.

    • bluGill 5 minutes ago

      I've seen lots of bubbles. I remember thinking Amazon was a bubble in the .com days...

      • iAMkenough 2 minutes ago

        Companies themselves can’t be economic bubbles. Amazon survived the economic bubble it was in, but many others didn’t.

  • scotty79 30 minutes ago

    I have no idea who would they even bailout. Investors? Why? What for? What would that change?

    Bailing out banks made some sense so that they couldn't operate. Without the bailout there would be no more banks and a hundred million of people left on the ice.

    If you want to keep AI operating you can just (temporarily?) ban investors from tearing down the AI companies they invested in for parts. You could say they are important for national security or something. I'm sure they are already earning enough to keep the lights on. Just not enout to give investors payback for insate capital expediture to set up.

    Such ban wolud the governement zero, especially if you write the law well enough, so that it can't be succesfully challenged in court.

armchairhacker 43 minutes ago

This doesn’t actually require anything like a law, it’s basically a verbal promise. Or am I misreading?

If AI companies were to go bankrupt, it’s possible they’d be nationalized. I don’t see any other feasible option besides that or a bailout (or one but it’s effectively the other, e.g. “nationalized” but the employees including leaders are the same, or bailed out but already subservient to the military). I think the best case is for the compute to be made effectively public: giving every citizen free access, since we’re paying taxes that prevent their bankruptcy.

  • sputknick 39 minutes ago

    You are reading this exactly correct. It's the most government-coded kind of resolution: it sounds impressive, but means nothing. It is kinda nice to get that narrative out there though, we shouldn't bail out companies, we should let them fail and re-organize into companies that can work. "Bankrupt" doesn't necessarily have to mean you disappear and go away, it can mean you shuffle people and equipment around and get a new name and logo that makes more sense.

delichon 15 minutes ago

Better to just oppose all bailouts for all sectors, always.

  • ajross 13 minutes ago

    That's the logic that led to "Let's just let Lehman fail" and precipitated the 2008 crash. At scale, markets are not zero sum and failures sink all boats.

    There are no good answers here. But pointing fingers and assigning blame is for sure one of the worst ways to do the analysis.

    • delichon 2 minutes ago

      I don't doubt that there are possible bailouts with potential net positive outcomes, just that legislatures are capable of distinguishing them with an overall net positive outcome. Or that the benefits would outweigh the moral hazard of becoming reliant on them.

jrflo 11 minutes ago

Isn't the purpose of a bailout to stop a larger economic collapse rather than save a company?

  • bluGill 1 minute ago

    My contention is it doesn't stop a larger economic collapse - it just kicks it down the road and makes it grow even larger.

ferguess_k 15 minutes ago

Guess the big AI companies are not paying enough donation to them.

stego-tech 3 minutes ago

Fully support it. We’ve had a moral hazard in the USA for half a century with constant bailouts for speculation and gambling by businesses.

We must let them fail, no matter how many jobs it costs, no matter what the harm looks like in the short term, to send a clear and unambiguous signal to others that the government won’t backstop your shitty bets.

tangotaylor 4 minutes ago

> the billionaire AI boys who created the problem

Niki Parmar: am I a joke to you?

clbrmbr 6 minutes ago

isnt Anthropic already too-big-to-fail?

chollida1 14 minutes ago

The US media using the abbreviation Reps to mean representatives and Republicans at the same time is very confusing.

wryoak 1 hour ago

Gosh I really gotta get a real job again. The RLHF gig work has been great while I’ve been in school - flexibility, good pay - but I’ve known the whole time that it won’t last. Gig workers will be the last consideration when it all falls apart

nisten 9 minutes ago

Soo does this mean RAM is gonna get cheaper or more expensive?

anon291 22 minutes ago

I work on AI and I oppose a bailout for an ai bubble or whatever else.

If you're lucky enough to be in this field and you're not managing your finances, that's not the governments problem to fix

ineedaj0b 45 minutes ago

absolutely ZERO Ai companies need bailouts. this is complete theater.

if you are reading this, please do some research on how much money inference prints? its not wildly spoken about because people don’t yap about printing money.

“Oh but it’ll all come crashing down” - say you don’t work at a lab or know anyone at a lab.

My greater annoyance is HN becoming annoying political in the past few years. Sure, everything is political now but the moderation siloed these posts better. Maybe the user base is too old now. Fresh blood went to Discord or X.

  • bee_rider 39 minutes ago

    I think the “it’ll come crashing down” argument comes from cheaper inference, not more expensive. The frontier labs have to pay for these massive training runs. If inference gets cheap enough that you can run it yourself, why run it on their side? Open weights are (much) less than a year behind.

  • etempleton 35 minutes ago

    Please do some research on the other costs involved in AI. Not a single AI company is making any profit and realistically are not close. Training models costs billions of dollars. There is no moat for these companies. If an open model comes out tomorrow that is better than Claude what happens to Claude's 1.5 trillion dollar valuation? What happens if revenue does not grow as fast as anticipated when Anthropic alone has 750 billion dollars in obligations? How do they pay their bills? What happens then.

    The only company making money are hardware manufacturers who are throwing logs on to keep the fire burning through direct capital investments in their customers. Without Nvidia some of these neoclouds would already have failed.

  • vehemenz 22 minutes ago

    Projecting that none of these AI companies will demand bailouts after the bubble crash is wildly speculative in the other direction. This has nothing to do with politics.

woodpanel 46 minutes ago

a) How courageous for them declaring wanting to ban something that isn't being proposed

b) if an AI bubble burst were to happen, the fallout would be severe, ie. hard to abstain for policy makers from giving the public ease of mind

c) All this proposal wants is to drive a wrench between the GOP and its new (?) populist voters, that don't want any favors given to any Big Tech oligarchs, regardless of it being AI or not.

d) this may work or not – neither party is going to abstain from bailing them out, anyways.

  • chasd00 18 minutes ago

    Not sure why you're downvoted because you're right. If there wasn't a major election next week this would not even be happening. It's meaningless theatre to get the public cheering or jeering on their way to the polls.

    In the 2008/2009 crisis the bailouts were approved by a red admin (Bush) and then the check signed, delivered hat in hand, by a blue admin (Obama). If they want a bailout they will get a bailout no matter which party is in charge.