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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that you don't understand how tax exemption works?

According to the OpenAI charter, their mission is to "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." That's their legally binding mission - not selling cloud services by the token or licensing their models to companies like Microsoft and Apple. Any lawyer with half a brain would have advised them that those activities would almost certainly be found by the IRS and the courts to be unrelated business activities, so they spun them off as a for-profit corporation instead of taking an entirely unnecessary risk.

Just because their product is vaguely AGI related doesn't mean it has anything to do with their actual mission.

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I've ran a not for profit worth ~$100m. All of those things are ones which fall within the original charter of openai. It's only when you start doing completely unrelated activities, like Mozilla's women who code, or you start raiding the coffers of the organization, like Wikipedia, that you need fancy structures to hide the blatant theft.

> I've ran a not for profit worth ~$100m.

Based on this thread I find that incredibly hard to believe. Incredibly.

> It's only when you start doing completely unrelated activities, like Mozilla's women who code

Or like... Mozilla Firefox. Cause that's why they've had Mozilla Corporation since 2005. Google pays the corporation for default search engine placement and all of the full time Firefox developers I've ever known have worked for the corporation, not the nonprofit.

>Based on this thread I find that incredibly hard to believe. Incredibly.

It doesn't take much more than showing up and taking responsibility when no one else does.

>Or like... Mozilla Firefox. Cause that's why they've had Mozilla Corporation since 2005.

Yes, because Mozilla has always wanted to do more than be a browser company.

Remember Firefox OS?

Not for profits who have weird structures are there to make sure they can be looted for the benefit of the people running them, or to be used for pet projects that have nothing to do with the original charter.

> It doesn't take much more than showing up and taking responsibility when no one else does.

Your argument aside, I am interested to hear you found it straightforward to run a successful non-profit.

Any tips for someone who is interested to enter that space?

Talk to people, be helpful, find what the pain points of the organization are and solve them.

If you don't turn it into a personal fiefdom expect hard work, no gratitude and eventual burnout.

Mozilla Corporation creation had nothing to do with Firefox OS or ambitions beyond Mozilla as a browser company -- it was forced on us by the IRS, after they'd promised we could take sponsorship revenue from Google for the search deal, directly into the non-profit, tax-free.

The IRS reneged, which led to the creation of the Mozilla Corporation for-profit subsidiary in 2005 to take the Google search revshare from that time on (we paid negotiated back taxes for the period when they said sponsorship revenue was okay to take tax-free into the 501c3).

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