I think even if the US gov could nationalise an AI company, it would be quickly driven into the ground. I believe a lot of people had implicitly assumed that the NSA would have some kind of giant bunker somewhere, where a measurable fraction of GDP was secretly being siphoned off to bootstrap a national security superintelligence... but I'm not sure USG has state capacity for things like that anymore.

The government would do things like mandate weird procurement requirements, forcing them to spend 2 years on contract negotiation for chips or power. Hardware that was obsolete by the time it was procured.

The problem is that if they nationalised or "commandeered output", some bureacrat would suddenly become responsible for everything wrong with the system and would have to CYA. They would introduce so much administrative and legal complexity that progress would grind to a halt.

Also like say they nationalize, then what? Presumably they're doing this to "make" something happen that wouldn't have happened otherwise? But how do you force basically the highest leverage people in the world right now to work for you? They would quit, and work for a different company. Or leave the country.

So... what happens to the equity? The government is supposed to compensate shareholders. Would OpenAI still be able to hire with equity incentives? Would their staff be on government payscales?

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I have a really cool idea! In this system nobody owns any property, and to keep everyone happy the government tells you how to live your life.

Does anyone happen to know what would a system like that be called?

Hey y’all I’m starting to think this dude might not be a good guy! What a surprise.

dude just wants his company to be in the news, so he tweets stuff like this

Nationalization assumes AGI creates a monopoly worth seizing. But if multiple labs converge simultaneously and price it toward marginal cost, there's nothing to nationalize. The question is whether governments coordinate before commoditization makes the whole debate moot. History suggests they don't: https://philippdubach.com/posts/is-ai-really-eating-the-worl...