Existing OpenAI Questions | TechCrunch

OpenAI has been in the news a lot lately, whether those stories are about acquisitions, competition with Anthropic, or larger debates about the impact of AI on society.

In the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I do our best to cover all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s recent acquisitions appear to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested that they address “the two biggest problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”

First, with the team that created Hiro’s finance, the company may hope to come up with a product that “has more hooks than a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with the new launch of TBPN in the media, OpenAI may be looking to “better shape its image in the public eye, which recently has not been good.”

Read a preview of our interview, 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 that comes after another deal that was announced literally when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN – a business talk show, as a new media company.

And I think both of these protocols are very small compared to the OpenAI scale. These are not things that people expect to really change the way they do business or anything like that, but they are interesting because it suggests that this is still there. [attitude of,] “Let’s try different things.”

Mostly [with] TBPN agreement […] especially at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is trying to really focus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in the business and programmers world.

Are you running a tech talk show, should that be on your to-do list?

Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s all.

I want to say Hiro because to me that’s interesting, because Julie Bort, our business editor, is very talented, she wrote about this and I think I’m the first to write about it. You’ve come in a bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “On this day, you will no longer be able to reach this.”

This is a personal start to finance. And they started only two years ago. So this is about getting talent on board. So I’m curious to see if OpenAI will just bring them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they like some kind of financial product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear.

Sean: I think you view both of these as acqui-hires to some extent. I mean, the acquisition of TBPN, it is suspected that they will maintain their editorial independence in the show they do every day. And all respect to those guys who put that out there and quickly got it off the ground and grew it into what it has become.

I think that any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that if you find something like that and put the people who make the show under the public policy organization people and comms or marketing people who are close to the top of the company that makes the acquisition, that you can have good questions about whether or not the “independence of planning” is enough. It’s not just a saying that works.

But you know, what interests me about these two, while they are similar in their employment, I think they both represent two of the biggest problems that OpenAI is facing.

The other is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As to whether that will ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that doesn’t raise the world’s biggest private equity rounds, for how long, to keep things going, is a big question. And they seem to be struggling to stay in the business of things where the real money seems to be there, so bringing in a team like this seems to be taking the shot, “What else can we do?”

The guy who founded Hiro seems to have an entrepreneurial streak for creating consumer apps, so this seems like a bet to me that they can come up with something that might have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.

Then TBPN is an acquisition designed to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the eyes of the public, which recently has not been good and is under more questions now than a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow recently led a report in The New Yorker that went down suspiciously when this and several other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.

I think those are the two biggest problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.

Kirsten: So the thing you didn’t mention is, there’s an Anthropic brand coming – not in the shadows, I mean, they’re taking up a lot of space here – but they’re very successful on the business side of things.

It feels like these guys are rivals and they feel like very different companies in many ways. Anthony, I wonder if you see them as direct competition for OpenAI? Or [are they] just to find their footing in business and in a way, these two companies will clearly coexist and not directly compete – maybe for talent, but not as we originally thought?

Anthony: I think they compete with each other. There really is a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope, both can be very successful companies, they can be one and two. And the success of one does not mean that the other will disappear.

And again, none of this is official, but there has been a lot of reporting about how it seems that OpenAI, more than anyone, is very focused and upset about the rise of Anthropic.

Our reporter Lucas [Ropek]he did a big segment over the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they were like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is good, too,” but like they were all talking about Claude Code. And I think that’s exactly what OpenAI is concerned about.

Because also, in theory, there may be many other opportunities for productive AI, but it feels like a big growth area, a place where there is a lot of money and where they can at least see a way to have a sustainable business in the future, in these business tools and codes.