Yeah but in a lot of cases it's because money (especially AI fundraising money) is hella cheap and it's far more profitable (like, 10-100x) to co-found their own AI startup than to play senior scientist for someone else.
Nothing in AI would pay a cent to a worker coop, because revenues are very small right now, it's all "potential".
So even though the expected value is (correctly, in the medium term, IMO) super high, everyone would get nothing based on current or near term revenues, which is exactly the situation VC exists to rectify. What you're seeing is the free market working correctly as more founders jump in to take VC money and make bets on their ability to execute.
Well, a "mostly worker coop" in the sense of a company that takes capital from elsewhere but where shares are otherwise spread out among the workers could still work as a VC funded company as long as they addressed the issue of how to make it possible for that VC to get an exit. It becomes easier to get to a middle ground the cheaper it becomes to take capital.
Interestingly one of the things Marx and Proudhon violently agreed on was that cheap credit is one of the most radical things you can create. The reasoning is simple: The cheaper credit is, the less power employers have over employees. To take a hypothetical extreme: if credit is free and guaranteed, an employee can walk out at any point and take whatever time they need to figure out what to do, at which point employer power of employees is nullified.
As such, at some point along a gradient of cost and access - and it may well be an impossible point to reach - capitalism becomes indistinguishable from socialism, in that capital ownership becomes a matter of choice.
