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