OpenAI has acquired popular tech industry talk show TBPN — Technology Business Programming Network — making it the AI giant’s first acquisition of a media company. The show will report to OpenAI’s chief policy officer, Chris Lehane.
TBPN, hosted by former tech founders John Coogan and Jordi Hays, is a three-hour daily live show on YouTube and X, focusing on technology, business, artificial intelligence and defense.
The series has gained a cult following in Silicon Valley, a safe space where industry powerhouses can speak candidly and be questioned by their peers. The show has a reputation for being something of a sports hub for the tech industry — a place where top tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Marc Benioff and, yes, Sam Altman, come to chop it up, react to the news of the day and occasionally make their own.
TBPN will live on as its own brand, which OpenAI will help scale. Not that he necessarily needed help on that front. TBPN has grown into an empire that is on track to raise more than $30 million this year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
OpenAI already has its own podcast for long conversations with the tech people in the company.
OpenAI will also use the founders’ “amazing comms and marketing instincts” outside of the show, according to OpenAI’s AGI development lead Fidji Simo, who said TBPN will “bring AI to the world in a way that helps people understand the full impact of this technology in their daily lives.”
Simo went even further, noting that TBPN’s prowess is necessary for an informal company like OpenAI where “the standard communication playbook just doesn’t apply.”
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He said TBPN would have editorial independence and would continue to “run its own programming, choose its own guests and make its own editorial decisions.”
However, the acquisition may give some pause. After all, OpenAI is a valuable AI lab on the verge of an IPO that buys a buzzy talk show that frequently discusses the company and its competitors. And once the deal closes, TBPN will operate under OpenAI’s strategy team and report to Chris Lehane, the man who coined the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy” as a tool to deflect press scrutiny in the Clinton White House.
Lehane, who has been described as a master of the “political dark arts,” is also behind the crypto industry super PAC Fairshake, which has spent hundreds of millions to bring anti-crypto candidates to their knees in the 2024 election. He joined OpenAI that same year and has been in President Trump’s ear ever since, whispering sweeping and controversial policy recommendations like preventing of states to regulate artificial intelligence and relaxation of environmental restrictions which can slow down data center construction.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who told a post on social media that TBPN is his favorite tech show, seems to think the acquisition won’t change TBPN’s commentary and even criticism of the company.
“I don’t expect them to go easy on us, I’m sure I’ll do my part to enable it with the occasional stupid decision,” he wrote.
TBPN, meanwhile, sees the acquisition as a means to do more than just comment.
“While we’ve been critical of the industry at times, after getting to know Sam and the OpenAI team, what stood out the most was their openness to feedback and their commitment to getting it right,” Hays said in a statement. “Moving from commentary to actually impacting how this technology is distributed and understood globally is incredibly important to us.”
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