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Comment by nroets | Hacker News Reader

"Theft" means taking something from someone without consent. Who lost what ? There is no law suite, so maybe it's a donation ??

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The taxpayers / government. If they have been abusing their NP status to avoid taxes, they should have to back pay those.

Surely they have never turned a profit and are a long way from being profitable. If so, what taxes, current or back, would they owe?

The money they received was tax deductible for the people who “donated it”. They money should have been taxed as income for either the earner or OpenAI.

I'd be curious if people were actually writing off their OpenAI bills as donations. That would be a big number for the enterprise deals, if they qualify as a donation

Surely the money coming in would otherwise have been investments exchanged for stock, which are not taxed until gains are realized.

Income taxes are not the only tax non-profits are exempted from. Sales and property taxes are others, depending on jurisdiction, California being one such state. I am not familiar if OpenAI-NP has been exempted from these

https://www.fplglaw.com/insights/california-nonprofit-law-es...

What taxes are they not paying?

I am unable to find any concrete claim of specific tax avoidance. Only these exasperated “but taxes” comments.

Non-profits are literally tax-exempt. OAI spent 10 years being tax-exempt in exchange for doing work that fully benefits the public. Now that work, 10 years of tax exempt work, is being handed over to a taxable outfit, a for-profit organization. If the result of 10 years of tax-exempt efforts get handed to a for-profit company, the taxes that were never paid should be because the public benefit that got them the tax benefit wasn't fulfilled, in fact it was stolen and handed to ultra-wealthy capitalists.

Do you think really think they were profitable during that time?

What taxes did the non-profit skirt?

All the sources I can find say that the revenue of ChatGPT was through the for-profit division, and that they’ve been paying taxes on all their revenue.

Is there some other tax that they’ve avoided paying?

Sales & property, see my nearby comment for links

Oh shit, the company that revolutionized AI didn’t pay their fair share of SF property taxes. Now I understand the outrage!

It doesnt matter what kind of tax they didnt pay. They SHOULD pay tax. Otherwise this makes it a loophole for private companies to dump research & development costs on the taxpayer but reap all the profits.

Huh? The loophole is already there.

Everything of their restructuring was signed off on by multiple states’ attorneys general. And their for-profit entity pays taxes like any other company.

Making them pay tax on stuff they did while a non-profit is making up laws on the fly - a strong, rule-of-law-based system is critical for the US to function properly.

You can’t just arbitrarily make decisions based on what you think should happen because it’s fair or unfair.

If you want OpenAI to pay back taxes, you need to change the laws first.

The issue is not the laws. The issue is that OpenAI mislead officials and externalized costs on the taxpayer.The extent to which this happened should be looked into by professionals.

It's not about changing the laws, it's about enforcing the ones we have fairly. Too many orgs and companies buy politicians, and now ballrooms for them

What law was not enforced?

People who are experts should look into it and let us know (i.e. an investigation)

I would not trust the corporations and politicians to be forthcoming or transparent on this

You mean the results that a few other companies almost instantly copied and productive themselves once the way to do it was discovered? There is no moat around LLMs.

The AI researchers who joined and worked for less money than they would have been paid by a big tech company because they thought it was the right thing to do.

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