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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes AI can help usher in \u201cunbelievable abundance,<\/a>\u201d but he says he wants to ensure that such abundance is shared. Toward that end, Altman has embraced <\/a>a theory of 19th century political economist Henry George<\/a>, who in his own lifetime worried about wealth amassing in the hands of the few following the industrial revolution. George posited that greater equality could be enjoyed if the economic value of land belonged equally to all members of society.<\/p>\n Altman similarly believes that in a world where jobs may create less economic value, a land tax could make up for income tax and guarantee that all individuals\u2019 assets rise as land \u2014 a fixed asset \u2014 grows in value. He\u2019s putting his money where his mouth is, too, leading a seed round in a six-month-old startup that represents a step in that same direction.<\/p>\n On its face, the outfit, called ValueBase<\/a>, sounds fairly banal. It plans to use land-first models to create mass appraisal modeling and property valuations. Feeding data from weather balloons and aerial photography vendors among other sources into its algorithm, ValueBase says it can automate much of the appraisal of both land and buildings for municipal property tax assessors, many of whom still rely on pen and paper and who focus primarily on the characteristics of buildings and less on the land where those buildings sit.<\/p>\n The idea is to flip the model a bit, says ValueBase cofounder Lars Doucet. \u201cIf you understand that land is one of the key drivers of value, you don\u2019t necessarily need to crawl through people\u2019s windows and rifle through their house and take all these invasive pictures. If you can value the land first, you can get more accurate because you have more access to the land characteristics, including distance to schools, distance to jobs, how much street noise there is, how much pollution there is, whether there is a nice view \u2014\u00a0 all of these things are very legible without ever entering the property and therefore easier to calculate.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a smart approach for numerous reasons. For one thing, working with municipal property tax assessors could help those assessors make a clearer case to a home or building owner about why a property has been assigned a specific value. ValueBase could also become more valuable to cities as many tax assessors retire. (Most<\/a> are middle-age white men in the U.S.)<\/p>\n ValueBase\u2019s strategy is also self serving. It gets access to critical data that it can use to create more commercial applications, including for brokerages and mortgage lenders.<\/p>\n Either way, ValueBase has a higher calling, insists Doucet. It wants to pave the way for public works in a particular place by learning as much as it can about every parcel in the U.S. and beyond. \u201cIf someone asks, \u2018Hey, what\u2019s all the land in Idaho worth?\u2019 and \u2018Can you tell me down to the parcel?\u2019 we\u2019ll be the first people they want to call about that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Currently, it\u2019s hard to imagine anyone asking that question, let alone of ValueBase, which still employs just four people, who are spread across North Carolina, Virginia and Texas.<\/p>\n Still, if Altman is right about the exponential rate of change we\u2019re collectively facing, that could change, and clearly, he\u2019s willing to bet on it.<\/p>\n Hydrazine Capital, a fund run by Altman and business partner Ryan Cohen, led the $1.6 million round in ValueBase. They joined by former Github CEO Nat Friedman, serial entrepreneurs Sahil Lavingia and Erik Torenberg and others.<\/p>\n