[codekansas]

1. How would this not make tools like Github Copilot exorbitantly expensive? Why should I have to pay a tax to everyone else in the United States to use something that was disproportionately trained on my own data?

2. Given that the internet is global, is every country supposed to make their own versions of this? Will I have to pay the EU tax to use models that might have been trained on data that Europeans posted online?

[barathr]

To your first question, it would incentivize training of models on one's own data exclusively -- companies could train something like Copilot on their own code, for instance. To your second question, there's no way to have an international policy like this so yes each jurisdiction would do it independently -- just as they do with thousands of other similar things.

[codekansas]

I don't think a model trained on a single company's data would be nearly as helpful as a model trained on all publicly licensed code on the internet. But suppose it were...

What if I'm not a massive corporation with millions of lines of code to train on and I want to pay for an AI coding assistant? Doesn't this make it effectively illegal for me to purchase such a product for a reasonable price when big companies will presumably be able to use it without paying the tax?

Another situation - let's say you're a company that contributes heavily to open source, but also accepts external contributions. Could Facebook train a model on the React codebase, for example, without having to pay the AI tax?

Another situation - suppose I start an LLM coding assistant and sell it to my friend. Presumably I don't have to pay the tax as a "low revenue" company. Then I get acquired or get some huge seed round and suddenly my customers have to pay the AI tax. Doesn't this just nuke all my customers?

Anyway, as a software engineer, I personally want people to use my code for whatever they want to use it for, without having to pay me for it. I indicate that by using an MIT license. Why throw that precedent out the window?

[barathr]

The policy would exempt all except big companies from the fees. So if you set up your own, you don't pay. And the effect of the revenue threshold creating an advantage for small businesses is commonplace in policy across the board -- SMBs don't have many of the same costs and obligations as larger companies.

And this would not prevent you from explicitly licensing your code or writing to let people to train on it. But what it would do is say that if someone didn't explicitly license it then it is covered under the policy.

[codekansas]

Also regarding international policy - good luck getting Chinese citizens to pay the US AI tax. Effectively you'd be nerfing anyone under US jurisdiction

[barathr]

Not really -- it's the same as selling any service into the US. Yes people cheat on, say, sales tax, just like Amazon did in the early years, but eventually once big enough companies end up having to adhere to the policy.