OpenAI has been all over the news lately, so let’s talk about it purchases, Competition with Anthropicor A larger debate about the impact of AI on society.
In the latest release TechCrunch’s Equity podcastKirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane and I have done our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s recent acquisitions may seem like classic acquisitions, Sean suggested they 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 develop a product that is “something with more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI may be looking to “improve its public image, which has not been good lately.”
Read a preview of our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
Anthony: (We) have two deals worth noting, one is this OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. This comes on the heels of another deal that was announced literally while recording our last episode of Equity, so we couldn’t help but talk about it: OpenAI also acquired TBPN — a business talk show as a new media company.
In my opinion, both of these deals are pretty small compared to OpenAI’s scale. They’re not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it still shows that (attitude), “Let’s try different things.”
Especially (with) the TBPN deal (…), especially at a time when it feels like OpenAI from all the reports we’ve read is really trying to refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive with programmers in an enterprise context.
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Is hosting a tech talk show, should that really be on your to-do list?
Kirsten: No, it 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, the super talented Julie Bort, wrote about it and I think she was the first to write about it. He did some digging and basically it looks like a rental. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you will no longer be able to access it.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they only started two years ago. So it’s all about managing talent. So I’m very interested to see if OpenAI will just soak them up in OpenAI, or if they’re really interested in some kind of personal finance product that they want to work on. It’s not really clear to me.
Sean: I think you see both of these as obligations to some degree. I mean, the acquisition of TBPN is supposed to keep them editorially independent on the show they produce every day. And all respect to the guys who put it out there and took it off the ground so quickly and made it what it is.
I think anyone who watches the media should have a healthy skepticism that when you get something like this and you put the people who make the show under the public policy people, or the comforts, or the marketing people at the higher levels of the buying company, you can have good questions about whether or not it’s enough to say “editorial independence.” It’s not just magic that works.
But you know what’s interesting to me about these two is that while they’re similar in what they’re achieving, I think they both represent two major challenges that OpenAI is facing.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As for whether this will actually make them enough money to become a sustainable business that doesn’t raise the world’s biggest private rounds, that’s a big question. And they have a hard time staying on the enterprise side of things that look like there’s real money involved, so bringing in a team like that is like, ‘What else can we do?’ seems to answer the question.
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a consistent entrepreneurial streak in building consumer apps, and so it seems to me like a bet that they can come up with something more hooky than just a chatbot, and maybe worth paying more for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition to better represent what the company does and build its image in the public eye, which hasn’t been doing well lately and is certainly more in question now than it was a few weeks ago because Ronan Farrow just He led a report in The New Yorker The timing of this and several other announcements from OpenAI last week was suspiciously low.
I think these are the two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: What you’re not saying is that anthropic is kind of in the limelight—not in the shadows, I mean, they’re very prominent here—but they’re very successful on the enterprise side of things.
It feels like these guys are competitors and feel like very different companies in many ways. Anthony, I wonder if you see them as direct competition with OpenAI? Or are (they) just finding advancements in the enterprise, and in a sense, the two companies will obviously co-exist, and they’re not really competing directly with each other – maybe talent-wise, but not in the way we first thought of them?
Anthony: I think they are in direct competition with each other. There is definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope, both could be very successful companies, just one and two. And the success of one doesn’t mean the other will simply fade into obscurity.
Again, none of this is official, but there have been many reports that OpenAI is more interested and upset by Anthropic’s rise than anyone else.
Our reporter Lukas (Ropek) did a great piece for the weekend About the HumanX conference, talking to everyone there and they were like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is good too,” but it was all about Claude Code. I think that’s exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth area, the area where the most money is, and where they can at least see a way to have a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.
