Existential Questions for OpenAI | TechCrunch

OpenAI has been all over the news lately, whether or not that news is about it Acquisitions, Competition with Anthropyor Greater discussions about the impact of AI on society.

In the last episode of TechCrunch’s Stocks PodcastKirsten Korosek, Sean O’Kane, and I have done our best to gather the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions sound like classic takeovers, Sean suggested that 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 may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more appeal than just a chatbot, and perhaps something worth paying a little more for.” With the new media launch TBPN, OpenAI could look to “better shape its image in the public eye, which hasn’t been great lately.”

Read a preview of our conversation, edited below for length and clarity.

Anthony: (We have) two deals worth mentioning, one of which is this OpenAI has acquired a personal finance startup called Hiro. This comes after another deal that was announced literally when we were recording the latest episode of Equity, so we couldn’t talk about it: OpenAI also acquired TBPN – A commercial talk show, such as a new media company.

I think these two deals are very small compared to the size of OpenAI. These aren’t things that people expect to change the course of their business or anything like that, but it’s interesting because it suggests that there’s still this (attitude) of, “Let’s try different things.”

Especially (with) the TBPN deal (…) Especially at this time when it seems like OpenAI, from all the reports we’re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.

Should running a tech talk show be on your to-do list?

Kirsten: No, this shouldn’t be on your to-do list. That’s it.

I want to mention Hero because, to me, this is interesting, because Julie Port, our project editor, who is very talented, wrote about this and I think she was the first to write about it. I dug a little and this basically seems like it’s acquired. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you won’t have access to this anymore.”

This is a personal finance startup. They were launched only two years ago. So it’s definitely about engaging talent. So I’m curious to see if OpenAI will just absorb them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some kind of personal finance product that they want to work on. For me, it’s not really clear.

Shawn: I think you look at both of them as somewhat acquired employees. I mean, the TBPN takeover, they would allegedly retain editorial independence in the show they put on every day. And all respect to those guys who put that out there and came out of it so quickly and developed it into what it became.

I think anyone 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 the public policy and communications people or the marketing people next door at the top of the company doing the acquisition, you can have good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not a spell that just works.

But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two is, even though they’re similar in their acquisition gain, I think they represent two major problems that OpenAI faces.

One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As to whether or not that will actually provide them enough money to become a sustainable company that doesn’t raise the largest private rounds in the world, ever, to keep things going, is a big question. They also seem to be struggling to keep up with the business side of things where the real money seems to be there, so bringing in a team like this feels like an attempt to ask the question: “What else can we do?”

The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a string of entrepreneurs creating consumer apps, so it seems to me that this is a bet that they can come up with something else that might have more traction than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying a little more for.

And so 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 hasn’t been great lately and is certainly more in question now than it was just a few weeks ago, because only Ronan Farrow He led a report in The New Yorker Which dropped suspiciously around the time this and other OpenAI ads came out last week.

I think these are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.

Kirsten: So the thing you didn’t say is that there’s an Anthropic kind of looming on the horizon – not in the shadows, I mean they take up quite a lot of space here – but they’ve had great success on the business side of things.

It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like they’re completely different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I wonder if you consider them a direct competitor to OpenAI? Or (are they) finding their stride in the entrepreneurial space and somehow, it’s clear that these two companies will coexist and that they’re not actually competing directly with each other – perhaps for talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them?

Anthony: I think they are in direct competition with each other. There’s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope, then they could both be very successful companies, they could be the No. 1 and No. 2 companies. The success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will fade into obscurity.

And again, none of this is official, but there have been a lot of reports about how OpenAI, more than anyone else, seems obsessed and upset by the rise of Anthropics.

Our correspondent Lukas (Rubik) did. Great piece for the weekend About the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they were kind of saying, “Oh yeah, ChatGPT is good too,” but like they were all talking about Claude Code. And I think this is exactly what OpenAI is concerned about.

Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it seems like the big growth area, the area where there is the most money and where they can at least see a path to have a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and programming tools.