OpenAI still isn’t sure how it should handle the collection of sales taxes for purchases made through its site, according to two insiders who spoke to The Information. They should probably figure that out soon, right?
Currently ChatGPT can facilitate the sale of goods inside its app from merchants on Etsy and Shopify, which handle the processing of the transactions, including sales taxes. However Ann Gehan of The Information wrote:
“For its shopping expansion to really take off, however, ChatGPT would likely need to list a wider range of goods, including big brands, potentially forcing it to handle more of the transaction processing itself—including the collection of sales taxes. That could mean building its own capabilities to collect and remit taxes, as well as adding tax compliance staff. And if OpenAI does build a significant shopping business down the road, it could be the target of state audits.”
OpenAI says in its terms of service that merchants are the ones facilitating the transactions and thus are responsible for the sales they make through ChatGPT, however, many state marketplace tax laws supersede that rule and become especially relevant given that OpenAI is processing the payments and taking a cut of the sale. That’s a “marketplace” by any definition of the word.
I see OpenAI’s lack of e-commerce discipline as a symptom of a bigger problem: it’s simply doing too much.
In the past 3 years, OpenAI has launched an incredibly vast array of seemingly disparate services, including:
- Ads
- Health
- Instant Checkout
- Sora
- Stargate
- Frontier
- Codex
- Prism
- Deep Discovery
- Pulse
- Harvey
- Atlas Browser
- ChatGPT Apps
- Operator
- ChatGPT Edu
- Canvas
- GPT Store
Now it’s also entering the capital intensive hardware device business with Jony Ive, building data centers and other AI infrastructure, and reportedly entering the AI smut business with an “Adult” model.
How can one company — especially one that’s still so relatively new, dependent on ongoing investor capital infusion to survive, and deals with ongoing employee turnover — think it can do so much, and do it well?
OpenAI’s mission right now feels like that of a child who says, “When I grow up, I want to own the world’s biggest tech company, and we’ll do AI and movies and make cool gadgets and go to space and…”
The company seriously lacks discipline, both financially and directionally, and ultimately its products will suffer as a result.
