OpenAI has been all over the news lately, whether it’s about acquisitions, competition with Anthropic, or the larger conversation about AI’s impact on society.
In the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I do our best to round up all the latest news in OpenAI. While the company’s latest acquisition appears to be a classic acquisition, Sean suggested it also addresses “two big existential problems that OpenAI is currently trying to solve.”
First, in collaboration with the team at personal finance startup Hero, the company may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a chatbot, and perhaps something that’s worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI may be aiming to “better shape its public image, which has not been very good lately.”
Read a preview of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
Anthony: There are two deals worth mentioning. For one, OpenAI acquired a personal finance startup called Hero. And it came after another deal that was announced literally as we were taping the final episode of Equity, so we couldn’t talk about it. OpenAI also acquired TBPN, a business talk show like new media company.
And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the size of OpenAI. These are interesting because they suggest that while we’re not expecting people to drastically change the direction of their business, there’s still a “let’s try different things” attitude.
Especially the deal with TBPN (…), especially at a time when it feels like from all the reports we’re reading that OpenAI is also going to really focus on ChatGPT and making that GPT model really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.
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Kirsten: No, this shouldn’t be on your to-do list. that’s it.
I want to mention Hiro because it’s interesting to me. Because our Venture Editor, Julie Bolt, is very talented and she wrote about this and I think I was the first to write about it. She did a little digging, but basically this looks like an earned hire. The company is going bankrupt. They basically said, “By this date, you will no longer have access to this.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this is definitely aimed at recruiting talent. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI just absorbs them into the OpenAI ether or if they’re actually interested in some kind of personal finance product that they want to work on. For me, I don’t really understand it.
Sean: I think we both see them as acquirers to some degree. In other words, with the acquisition of TBPN, they are said to intend to maintain editorial independence in the programming they produce every day. And I salute the people who put it out there, got it off the ground quickly, and grew it into what it is today.
I think anyone who follows media should have a healthy skepticism that when you buy something like that, and you put the people who make the programs under the structure of the public policy department, and you put the publicists and marketing people in the upper echelons of the acquiring company, you have a good question about whether the term “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not just a spell that works.
But what’s interesting to me about these two is that while they’re similar in terms of their acquireability, I think they both represent two big problems facing OpenAI.
One person is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. The big question is whether it can actually become a sustainable business that hasn’t raised one of the largest private rounds in the world and actually make enough money to keep things going. They also seem to have a hard time sustaining initiatives on the corporate side where there is real money, and bringing in a team like this seems like a challenge to “What else can we do?”
The person who founded Hero seems to have a serial entrepreneurial flair for building consumer apps. So this seems to me like a bet on whether they can come up with something that has more hooks than just a chatbot and is probably worth paying more money for.
And TBPN was an acquisition made to better represent the company’s business and better shape its image in the public eye. Lately it hasn’t been very good and is certainly open to more questions than it was a few weeks ago. Because Ronan Farrow just led a report in The New Yorker about this and several other announcements from OpenAI coming out last week that went down suspiciously.
I think these are two big existential questions that OpenAI is currently trying to solve.
Kirsten: So what you didn’t say is that things like Anthropic are looming — not in the shadow, I mean, they’re taking up so much space here — but they’re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things.
These companies feel like competitors, but they also feel like very different companies in many ways. Anthony, do you see them as a direct competitor to OpenAI? Or are they just seeing advancements in the enterprise space, and in some ways these two companies are clearly meant to coexist and not actually compete directly with each other? Perhaps in terms of human resources, but not necessarily as much as we first thought?
Anthony: I think they are in direct competition. There is certainly a scenario where if AI, as an industry and as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope, both companies could become very successful companies, or they could become one and two. And just because one is successful doesn’t necessarily mean the other will simply be forgotten.
Again, none of this is official, but there have been many reports about how OpenAI seems more obsessed and upset about Anthropic’s rise than anyone else.
Our reporter Lucas (Ropek) wrote a great article about the HumanX conference over the weekend. So he was talking to everyone there and they were like, “Oh, ChatGPT is good too,” but they were all like, about Claude Code. And I think that’s what OpenAI is concerned about.
Because, again, in theory, there could be a lot of other opportunities in generative AI, but it feels like the areas where there’s a lot of growth, where there’s the most funding, where there’s at least a path to having a sustainable business in the future, are in these enterprise tools and coding tools.
