OpenAI has been all over the news recently, be it acquisitions, competition with Anthropicor larger debates about the impact of artificial intelligence on society.
In the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions appear to be classic hires, Sean suggested 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 come up with a product that will have “more hooks than a simple chatbot and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its public image, which hasn’t been great lately.”
Read a preview of our discussion, edited for length and clarity, below.
Anthony: [We have] two deals worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And this comes on the heels of another deal that was literally announced when we were taping our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get around to talking about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN — a business talk show, like a new media company.
And I think both of those offerings are very small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These aren’t things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it suggests that there’s still that [attitude of,] “Let’s try different things.”
Especially [with] the TBPN agreement […] especially now that it feels like OpenAI, from all reports we’re reading, is also trying to refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models truly competitive in a business context with developers.
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Is running a tech talk show really supposed to be on the to-do list?
Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s all.
I want to mention Hiro because to me this is interesting, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, extremely talented, wrote about it and I think she was the first to write about it. Did a little digging and basically this looks like a given. The company folds. They basically said, “By this date, you will no longer be able to access it.”
This is a personal funding startup. And they only came out two years ago. So it’s definitely about talent acquisition. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is just going to absorb them into the ether into OpenAI, or if they’re really interested in some kind of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear.
Sean: I think you see both as acquired to some extent. I mean, the acquisition of TBPN, they’re allegedly going to keep their editorial independence on the show that they do every day. And all due respect to those guys who put it out there and started it so quickly and grew it into what it has become.
I think every person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you get something like this and you put the people who make the show under the organization of public policy people and comms or marketing people higher up in the acquiring company, that you might have good questions about whether or not the phrase “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not a spell that just works.
But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they’re similar in their recruitment, I think they both represent two big problems that OpenAI is facing.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As to whether this will actually ever make them enough money to become a viable business that never raises the largest private rounds in the world to keep things going is 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 that seems like taking a chance on the “what else can we do?”
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have an entrepreneurial streak in building consumer apps, so it seems like a bet to me that they can come up with something else that might have more hooks than a simple chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition that was made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which recently hasn’t been great and is certainly under more question now than it was just a few weeks ago because Ronan Farrow just led an expose in The New Yorker which suspiciously dropped right around the time that this and a few other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.
I think these are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: So what you didn’t say is that Anthropic comes in – not in the shadows, I mean, they take up a lot of space here – but they’re very successful on the business side of things.
It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Antony, I wonder if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? OR [are they] Just finding their jump in the business and somehow, these two companies will clearly co-exist and not actually directly compete with each other — maybe in talent, but not necessarily in the way we originally thought of them?
Anthony: I think they are in direct competition with each other. There is definitely a scenario where 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 one and both. And the success of one doesn’t necessarily mean the other will simply fade into obscurity.
Again, none of this is official, but there have just been a lot of reports about how it seems that OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed and upset with the rise of Anthropic.
Our reporter Lucas [Ropek]he did a great piece over the weekend about the HumanX conference where he was talking to everyone there and he was kind of like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is good too,” but like they were about Claude Code. And I think that’s exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for genetic AI, but it seems that the big growth area, the area where the most money is, and where they could at least see a path to a viable business in the future, is in these business and coding tools.
