Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill that would force AI companies with annual sales over $200 million to hand over 50% of their equity to a sovereign wealth fund. The legislation was drafted with help from Sarah Polcz, a law professor at UC Davis, whose husband, Adam Brown, leads Google DeepMind's Blueshift team.
Under the proposal, eligible AI companies would have to transfer half their equity into a fund managed by a seven-person, bipartisan committee appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The committee could appoint directors to the companies and would distribute roughly 5% of the fund's value to every US citizen each year — estimated at around $1,000 per person annually.
Venture capitalists are understandably nervous about being forced to give up half their stakes. Critics argue the steep tax would scare away the private capital needed to train large models. But Polcz and co-author Jeremy Bearer-Friend contend that since large models are trained on trillions of tokens of public data, the public deserves to share in the value as owners. The bill has some support among AI developers, too. Former Google researcher and ex-Deep Genomics machine learning lead Joel Shor agrees, saying tech workers are already reconsidering how models are built and who gets rich from them.
Polcz and Brown's social circle runs deep in Silicon Valley. Google co-founder Sergey Brin reportedly decided to return to the company at a party hosted at the couple's home. After the bill was announced, Brown accompanied Polcz to the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road, the heart of venture capital territory, to pop champagne.
Brown declined to comment on the legislation. Polcz clarified that her husband's work at DeepMind focuses solely on improving AI's scientific and reasoning abilities and that he has no policy position on how society should respond to the technology.