OpenAI has been all over the news recently, whether it’s news acquisitions, competition with anthropiceither Most important debates about the impact of AI on society.
In the last episode of TechCrunch Equity PodcastKirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane and I did our best to put together the latest news from OpenAI. While the company’s latest acquisitions appear to be classic hires, Sean suggested that they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”
First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company can hope to create a product that has “more hooks than a simple chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media company TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its image with the public, which hasn’t been very good lately.”
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
Antonio: (We have) two agreements worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And that comes after another deal that was announced literally when we were filming our last episode of Equity, so we couldn’t talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN – a talk show about business, like a new media company.
And I think both deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These aren’t things that people expect to actually change the course of their business or anything, but they’re interesting because they suggest that there’s still this (attitude of) “Let’s try different things.”
Especially (with) the TBPN deal (…) particularly right now when it seems like OpenAI, from all the reports we’re reading, is also trying to refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.
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Should hosting a tech talk show really be on your to-do list?
Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s all.
I want to mention Hiro because it’s interesting to me, because Julie Bort, our super talented project editor, wrote about this and I think she was the first to write about it. She did some research and basically this looks like an acquisition. The company is closing. They basically said, “By this date, you will no longer be able to access this.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they were only released two years ago. So it’s absolutely about bringing in talent. So I’m really curious to see if OpenAI will just suck them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some kind of personal finance product they want to work on. For me, it’s not very clear.
be: I think to some extent both are considered acquisitions. I mean, with the acquisition of TBPN, they’re supposedly going to retain their editorial independence on the show they do every day. And all the respect to those guys who put it there and got it off the ground so quickly and made it what it has become.
I think anyone who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like this and put the people who make the program under the organization of the adjacent public policy and communications or marketing people at the upper levels of the company making the acquisition, you might have good questions about whether saying “editorial independence” is enough or not. It is not a charm that just works.
But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acquisition, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI faces.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As to whether that will actually make them enough money to become a sustainable business that isn’t raising the world’s largest private rounds to keep things going, that’s a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up with the business side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like trying to ask, “What else can we do?”
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak in creating consumer apps, so it seems like a bet to me that they can come up with something else that might have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying extra for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image with the public, which hasn’t been very good lately and is certainly under more questioning now than it was just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow just led a report in The New Yorker that dropped suspiciously just as this and a couple other OpenAI announcements came out last week.
I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: So what you didn’t say is that there’s sort of Anthropic looming, not in the shadows, I mean, they’re taking up a lot of space here, but they’re having a lot of success on the business side.
It seems like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I wonder if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or are they just finding their business stride and in some ways these two companies are clearly going to coexist and not really compete directly with each other, maybe on talent, but not necessarily like we initially thought?
Antonio: I think they are directly competing with each other. There is definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the first and the second. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will simply fade into obscurity.
And again, none of this is official, but there have been many reports about how it seems that OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed and upset with the rise of Anthropic.
Our reporter Lucas (Ropek) did it. a great piece during the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they were like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is cool too,” but like it was all about Claude Code. And I think that’s exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be a lot of other opportunities for generative AI, but it seems like the big growth area, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.
