As the article says, companies this wealthy and successful are generally understood to have a civic responsibility to make contributions to their local community, above and beyond their tax obligations. It's a good equilibrium for everyone: the city doesn't have to hike taxes when companies get too successful, the companies get to appear generous, the public gets more stuff. I haven't fact checked the article, but if it's true that OpenAI has made "less than a million dollars" in SF civic contributions, that would be shockingly low for a company with their level of impact.

▲

Aurornis 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> are generally understood to have a civic responsibility to make contributions to their local community, above and beyond their tax obligations

Literally what taxes are for. If there are expectations that a company contributes to civic duties then make it a law and apply it equally.

Government should work on what the citizens should need. Having individual companies play it like a marketing game where the loudest voices get appeased is a very bad expectation. Decide what the people need centrally and apply tax dollars collected on a fair basis.

> but if it's true that OpenAI has made "less than a million dollars" in SF civic contributions

If you completely ignore all of the taxes paid by the corporations and their employees and also discount their civic contributions as not counting because the author of the op-ed doesn’t like them and therefore has decided they don’t count.

Even I can see why this game is unwinnable. The person writing this piece doesn’t understand how taxes work or the role of the government. They don’t even have great ideas for what would appease them. They just want to be angry at the current companies in the news and will move on to being angry at a different set of companies when the news cycle shifts in a few years.

	▲	SpicyLemonZest 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Again, what you're saying is not what the social compact has historically been. Most companies, both inside and outside of Silicon Valley, happily recognize their informal responsibilities to the communities where they're located. Our AI overlords certainly have a legal right to skimp on social responsibility, but then they may not like the taxes that we have to enact on them in response. > Even I can see why this game is unwinnable. The point is that this is not supposed to be a "game" to win or lose. As a San Francisco business, OpenAI is supposed to care about the health of San Francisco in and of itself, not just doing the minimum to discharge some abstract duty. If San Francisco residents are going around saying "I'm unhappy about OpenAI, they're making my housing cost way too much", there should be a team working on that as passionately as the team working on training the next model.

▲

JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> OpenAI has made "less than a million dollars" in SF civic contributions

OpenAI and Anthropic are going to drop metric fucktons of taxes into California—and San Francisco—when they IPO.

▲

phlakaton 2 days ago | parent [-]

Let's just say I'll believe that when I see it. Looks to me like they'll be operating at losses well beyond their IPOs.

▲

JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-]

> they'll be operating at losses well beyond their IPOs

Doesn’t matter for taxes on wages, options, realized gains, distributions, et cetera.

▲

phlakaton 2 days ago | parent [-]

Maybe wages if the company puts the IPO proceeds towards additional hiring. The other bits sound pretty speculative to me. I could see outside investors walking away with most of the early gains, leaving employees and locals underwater.

	▲	JumpCrisscross a day ago \| parent [-]
		> The other bits sound pretty speculative to me Then they aren’t affecting housing. If gains are being realized to convert into real estate, they’re getting taxed. If they aren’t getting taxed, they aren’t hitting housing. (There are edge cases. But this isn’t an edge-case hypothesis. The folks selling shares in the private markets to buy mansions are paying taxes.)

▲

zaptheimpaler 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

IIRC other tech companies like Meta and Google attempted to build housing in SF but were shot down by NIMBYs and city regulations the same as any other construction. Most of the US can barely build a lego house without years of permitting and consultations now, then it gets cancelled or overruns the budget and time by 20x. Any actual plan to rezone or build anywhere in the west, a 1000 boomers descens like a zombie army at the city meetings and stop it. Dumping money into the city can’t solve this particular problem.

	▲	SpicyLemonZest 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The regulatory environment for housing construction has changed a lot in the past 5 years, and in SF in particular the new "Family Zoning Plan" is a big deal. If OpenAI has been attempting to build housing in SF and got shot down by NIMBYs and regulations, I would agree that discharges their responsibility, but as far as I know they have not done this.