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Comment by versteegen | Hacker News Reader

It's disruptive technology and an enormous amount of value is likely to be created. I would much rather the profits go to a nonprofit which can distribute them charitably rather than them giving them away freely to the megacorps which actually have the resources to run these massive models (edit^2: at scale). I do think the 100x cap on return on Microsoft's $1B investment was way too high (we don't know what the cap is on later investments but it's meant to be reducing over time).

Edit: Plus it's still the case that OpenAI aren't putting profit above all else. E.g. they just released the ChatGPT API and it's 10x cheaper per token than GPT3! And their Charter does count for something, it's binding on them.

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A nonprofit wouldn't have to distribute profits to charity. It just can't distribute profits to private or public shareholders (because it can't have them). A nonprofit is obligated to reinvest any earnings towards its mission.

Not remotely an expert, this is just my basic understanding. "Nonprofit" is a pretty abused term.

TIL Amazon was basically a non profit

No, Amazon has shareholders, nonprofits do not.

The use of the word “basically” means that the previous commenter is saying that Amazon operated like a non-profit because it re-invested the vast majority of its profits.

Understand and disagree, since there’s a fundamental difference between Amazon and a nonprofit — both in their intended missions and the literal outcomes.

Not-profit just means it doesn't have shareholders in a traditional sense. But it can have real-estate, it can pay very high salaries, travel, distribute significant bonuses, buy expensive hardware, etc.

I just looked up the the top CEO salaries of non-profit organizations in the USA - as of 2020, they ranged from about $16 million to $8 million. A non-profit appears to simply be a 'non-stock corporation' and can have the same ridiculouly pyramidal compensation structures that shareholder corporations do.

Overhauling the legal definition of non-profit to require the highest-paid employees to make no more than ~10X as much as the lowest-paid employees would make a lot of sense.

A non-profit just means excess earnings are reinvested back into the organization instead of having the option of giving them to shareholders.

I think you are confusing non-profit with charity perhaps?

CEO salaries alone are the wrong metric. Not that I'm defending them at all (they're ridiculous) but another way to look at it:

As one example, the CEO of Kaiser was the highest paid nonprofit CEO at ~$18m[0] in 2021. That seems egregious until you realize Kaiser had $93b in revenue in 2021[1].

As one example from healthcare, the CEO of Moderna was paid $18m in 2021[2]. Moderna reported $18b in revenue in 2021[3].

You see this over and over in discussions about nonprofits, charities, etc. In most cases the executive leadership team is running a huge organization - in the case of Kaiser nearly $100b in revenue and 300k employees. Competent leadership at that scale is expensive.

In an ideal world this wouldn't be the case and individuals with these qualifications would be willing to take even more significant pay cuts for the "greater good" of whatever the mission of the nonprofit it. Per usual that's not the world we live in.

Speaking personally, I'd give pause to working with, donating to, etc an organization doing $100b in revenue with an executive team making 1/20 (or whatever) they would make elsewhere. In some limited cases for those who have "made their money" it would be a great thing. For anyone else I would assume they're either taking a HUGE pay cut for the cause (great thing, but unlikely) or completely incompetent, embezzling, etc.

[0] - https://www.erieri.com/blog/post/top-10-highest-paid-ceos-at...

[1] - https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/news/kaiser-foundation-he...

[2] - https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-lobbying/34...

[3] - https://investors.modernatx.com/news/news-details/2022/Moder....

> Overhauling the legal definition of non-profit to require the highest-paid employees to make no more than ~10X as much as the lowest-paid employees would make a lot of sense.

Very easy to work around by outsourcing most operations. If you really want to prevent high salaries there you'd need to link it to some more fixed measure, such as a multiple of median salary.

Well, "they are doing something amazing, so ethics can be suspended for T amount time in the name of value" is equally egregious from my point of view.

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