Methinks this post conflates “rent seeking” with “return on investment” just a tad.

Economic rent is the extra money you can charge for owning a scarce resource. ML models are not waterfront real estate, they are IP. Other people can make more models if they can/want to.

Now, whether IP should be legally protected is a totally separate question, and while we in the West tend to assume the answer is obvious geohot would certainly not be the first person to suggest broadly applying private property rights to information makes questionable sense.

People can make beaches. And they have.

Also, the defining feature of capitalism is that it encloses what was previously common.

Land used not to be owned (feudal lordship was functionally different than private ownership.) Then, society shifted, land became private, and that was the beginning of rent. This is enclosure.

The whole concept of IP is to explicitly extend this process to ideas -- they are not free, they are owned, and I have to pay you to use them. This is also enclosure, precisely.

Rent is charging money for access to an asset or property.

The P in IP is Property.