This week we’re going to look at some of the very first real world proposals for a universal basic income funded by AI companies. It was first proposed by Anthropic who has a documented plan. Their plan provoked a response from Elon Musk who proposed his own approach via a tweet. We’ll get into the details below.
The Jagged Technological Frontier
There’s a term in AI research called The Jagged Frontier. It describes the uneven results people may receive from an AI model. You ask it one thing and its response is on par with the smartest people in the world. Ask it something that is trivially easy for a human and it struggles to offer anything meaningful.
The tweet below is an almost perfect example of this phenomenon.
On the train yesterday, table of middle aged women next to me talking about AI. All ChatGPT, pronounced "chat GBT", no idea why lol
One of them was disappointed because she asked it to make a small crossword and it couldn't
I thought surely not. I use these models every day, they do things in minutes that'd take me hours. So I got the app out and asked for one myself
Every down clue is a copy of an across clue. "You ___ here" is apparently EST. The down answers are CET, ASE and TTN. Then it tells me its own puzzle isn't a proper crossword
No wonder people outside tech think it's a fad. The stuff that blows my mind at work they'll never see, and the first thing they try falls over
Today, I went to visit my grandmother in intensive care. While I was there, I ported Doom to the bedside monitor using Claude Opus 5.5. I synchronized the health percentage in the game with the patient’s pulse; if the health drops to 0, the pulse drops to zero too. This makes the game even more thrilling.
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Expect this month to be a busy one for new model releases. We have the scoop on a new Anthropic model, Google’s Gemini 4 Carbon, and a potential new Terra model from OpenAI.
You can read more about them in her article for The Information.
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.
It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion.
In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding.
Anthropic’s Public Benefit Fund is an LLC, not a charity. Here’s what their Oct 18 post actually locks in:
- subject to stockholder approval - 5% of shares committed now - board can add 2% for every 50% rise in company value above a baseline - none of that equity for lobbying or political giving, US or abroad - they may explore nonprofit donations or direct distributions to people - with co-founder + employee pledges, they say ~20% of shares go to public good - governance details still coming in the next months
I hate to be skeptical, but I’m skeptical. They’ve set this up so that they retain control, distribute funds at their discretion to people of their choosing. That may be perfectly fine… or it might not. At this point it just feels like more theater for marketing purposes.
Elon Musk Enters the Chat
He followed that up this morning with a promise to do just that:
So under Anthropic’s bill, Anthropic can kill 49 people and steal up to a billion dollars before anyone can legally stop them
At least they included some limits, right?
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