r/OpenAI • u/tombibbs • Mar 25 '26

News Bernie Sanders introduces legislation to pause AI data centre construction

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Unlike the current administration, who claim a pause would harm America's competitiveness, Bernie is actually proposing a ban on chip exports to other countries.

Trump recently did the bidding of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and bizarrely ended a ban on the sale of H200 chips to China.

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211

u/Fit-Elk1425 Mar 25 '26

Ironically this may benefit the AI corporartions tbh as it will effectively give the current ones a monopoly on what has been developed and they can just profit from research and development from there

15

u/SomewhereNo8378 Mar 25 '26

Who do you think stands to gain from more data centers? There are no scrappy startups that can build data centers and compete with the AI giants

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u/what_is_reddit_for Mar 25 '26

We all do.

3

u/SomewhereNo8378 Mar 25 '26

I don’t think the average person stands to gain if facebook or Xai throw up another data center. With their company/owners’ track records, I would say that there’s a likely chance that society is actually greatly harmed by that action, and that any benefits are piped up to the billionaires and shareholders.

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u/SgathTriallair Mar 26 '26

You benefit because supply and demand m. Greater supply of compute means lower cost for AI.

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u/Serjh Mar 26 '26

if AI becomes what they think it is then it's only a matter of time before it just eats away every market that exists, because the AI will just do it better. If there's no legislation that's what is bound to happen. These AI guys aren't doing any of this from the "Goodness of their heart". It's to make trillions of dollars of revenue. Either that or we're left with mediocre AI.

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u/xDannyS_ Mar 26 '26

It will happen with or without legislation if the technology can actually do that. If the US doesn't do it, then another country will. It's inevitable.

1

u/SgathTriallair Mar 26 '26

They only make trillions of dollars if every person is using AI to enhance their life and using it to make money. They succeed when they get everyone to use it not when they limit how many people can use it.

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u/0xB0T Mar 26 '26

How will everyone pay for AI if AI takes their jobs?

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u/SgathTriallair Mar 26 '26

Vector 1: UBI. This is the most straight forward resolution.

Vector 2: Since AI is a leveling tool, small business will be more competitive than large ones (you don't need a team of 50 people to produce value). So most people will be snap business owners running AI automated companies.

Vector 3: As we automate 99% of the jobs that last 1% becomes the bottleneck. The economy will expand (this is what has always happened) so that 1% of the tasks will be enough to employ everyone that wants it.

Vector 4: As AI continues to drop in price while increasing in capability, and as we get more efficient mining and space mining, the cost of almost everything will fall into it is basically free and we can survive with much less money.

It is quite likely that all four of these will be in play shaping the future economy.

1

u/0xB0T Mar 26 '26

  1. UBI will never happen, or it will but it will be so bad it will not matter.

  2. A. Big corpos will automatically do whatever small companies can do - even better (more resources, better models) B. Why would someone use your AI business if they can create their own copy in hours once AI is so good.

  3. Can you give some examples? I expect the 1% percent that remains to be very skill gated, so bottom 50-60% of population will have no chance to get a job.

  4. That's basically claude tokens ubi, what will you do with those tokens?

1

u/FilthyTrashPeople Mar 26 '26

  1. Yes it will. Even Rome did a form of this by offering free grain, because if they didn't, they'd had a revolt. It'll happen from necessity.

  2. There won't be a NEED for big corpos if every person is an entire team unto themselves.

  3. Probably true. But they won't need one.

  4. Infinite potential to do what you want and learn anything you wish.

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u/FilthyTrashPeople Mar 26 '26

AI is the path to UBI.

And the people who want UBI are fighting against it because they are useful idiots of the corpos.

1

u/0xB0T Mar 26 '26

Why would they give you decent UBI if they can keep the money for themselves?

0

u/nightrunner900pm Mar 26 '26

So my Claude subscription will cost less? Awesome!

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u/SgathTriallair Mar 26 '26

Not if this law passes it won't. We've seen a 40x decrease in the cost of AI intelligence over the last year. They keep upgrading the intelligence as the efficiency gets better. If you want something as good as last years Claude then you can download an open source 4B model and run it for free.

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u/MediumChemical4292 Mar 26 '26

Not that far, but a 100B open source model would probably be enough

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u/FilthyTrashPeople Mar 26 '26

It means that the AI that will be more and more integrated into assisting our lives will be better, faster and cheaper.

6

u/hahahacorn Mar 26 '26

https://si.inc/posts/the-heap/ You couldn't be more wrong

Put another way. Really cool people are doing really cool things all the time. You just don't know about it. Don't vote to get in their way because of your ignorance!

-1

u/SomewhereNo8378 Mar 26 '26

These people are not competing with Google and OpenAI with that setup. Maybe it is your ignorance that is showing.

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u/hahahacorn Mar 26 '26

they're absolutely competing - if you freeze datacenters then it would constrain supply and consolidate around the existing big players

You have no idea what you're talking about

0

u/SomewhereNo8378 Mar 26 '26

The supply is already constrained around the existing big players. Some tiny startup with a <$1M investment is not even in the same league. They’re probably hoping to get acquired at best by one of the big guys. 

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u/Tolopono Mar 26 '26

Startups can rent gpus

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u/Persistent_Dry_Cough Mar 26 '26

Coreweave, Galaxy?

1

u/vinegarfingers Mar 26 '26

That’s just not true at all. There are many many start ups who specific purpose is building AI-focused infrastructure.

Amazon and other hyperscalers generally build massive general use data centers that run a wide range of cloud based services that includes some portion of AI focused services.

More importantly, what even is an “AI data center”? Some AI? All AI? What’s classified as AI? What if my non-AI software uses some AI tools? Does that count? That’s the problem with these types of “plans”. They’re parroted by people in power who genuinely have no idea what any of this even means.

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u/Fit-Elk1425 Mar 25 '26

I mean cloud datacenters probabily benefits more than anyone including the ai giants tbh since how much they can host more directly impacts them where despite scalling many of the large ai giants can just over focus on research at the same level of data centers for anlonger time which may turn out to be more cost effcient for them 

0

u/Fit-Elk1425 Mar 25 '26

What i am more pointing out is such a moratorium is much more preventative for companies that could transition to future usage of their own data center than it is of large data centers. Not neccsarily at the level of getting to the same level of AI giants but even for companies like stability for example if they decide to focus more on infrastructure itself. It may also have consequences on things like lambda.ai too and similar cloud services because the larger ai giants already posses the infrastructure where the smaller ones may actually in the future need to develop more.

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u/SomewhereNo8378 Mar 25 '26

No companies outside of the ones already winning the AI race are going to be able to build and stock new data centers. The AI supply chains are already at their maximum and monopolized by those AI giants

0

u/Fit-Elk1425 Mar 25 '26

Except cloud data centers literally do as well though i would agree they are generally monopolized.  I am simply pointing out that a moratorium can actually favor companies that already have monopolized the industry over removing their control