# Nobody Profits

Feb 19, 2025

Intellectual property is a really dumb idea.

> “But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing merchandise.” - Joe Biden, 46th president of the USA

Except it isn’t and Joe Biden is a senile moron. Because when you smash the windows and grab the stuff, Tiffany’s no longer has the stuff. With piracy, everyone has the stuff. It’s a lot more like taking a picture, which Tiffany’s probably encourages. Win-win cooperation.

Wealth is being increasingly concentrated. What’s shocking to me is how much everyone still cares about money. Even the die-hard complain about capitalism type deeply cares, because the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. I hate scammers, but I’m pretty indifferent to money.

The best outcome of AI is if it delivers huge amounts of value to society but no profit to anyone.

The old days of the Internet were this goldmine. The Internet delivered huge value but no profit, and that’s why it was good. Suddenly we had all these new powers.

Then people figured out how to monetize it. It was a race to extract every tiny bit of value, and now we have today’s Internet. Can this play out differently with AI?

Let’s build technology and open source software that market breaks everything. Let’s demoralize the scammers so hard that they don’t even try. Every loser and grifter will be gone from technology because there’s nothing to be gained there. They can play golf all day or something.

If I ever figure out how to channel power like Elon, I will do this. Spin up open source projects in every sector to eliminate all the capturable value. This is what I’m trying to do with comma.ai and tinygrad. I dream of a day when company valuations halve when I create a GitHub repo. Someday.