OpenAI’s Existential Questions | TechCrunch

OpenAI has been all over the news recently, whether that news is about acquisitions, competition with Anthropic, or larger debates about AI’s impact 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 recent acquisitions appear to be classic acquisitions, 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 might hope to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a 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 conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.

Anthony: [We have] two deals worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI bought this private finance startup called Hiro. And it comes on the heels of another deal that was announced literally when we were taping our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get to talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN – a business talk show, as a new media company.

And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scope of OpenAI. 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 suggests that there’s still this [attitude of,] “Let’s try different things.”

Especially [with] The TBPN Agreement […] especially at this point where it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is also really trying to focus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.

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 it.

I want to mention Hiro because to me it’s interesting because Julie Bort, our venture editor, was super talented, she wrote about this and was, I think, the first to write about it. She dug in a bit and basically it looks like employment. The company is about to fold. They basically said, “On this date, you will not be able to access this anymore.”

This is a private finance startup. And they were only launched two years ago. So this is definitely about getting talent on board. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is just going to absorb them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some kind of personal finance product that they’re going to work on. For me it is not entirely clear.

Sean: I think to some extent you look at both of these as acquired employment. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, supposedly they want to maintain their editorial independence on the show they do every day. And all respect to the guys who put it out there and got it off the ground so quickly and grew it into what it has become.

I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy amount of skepticism that when you acquire something like this and you put the people who make the show under the organization of public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up in the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not a spell that just works.

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

One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. Whether that will actually ever give them enough money to become a sustainable company that isn’t raising the biggest private rounds in the world ever to keep things going is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up on the corporate side of things, where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, “What else can we do?”

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

And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its public image, which lately hasn’t been great and is certainly under more question now than it was just a few weeks ago because Ronan Farrow just ran a report in The New Yorker that fell suspiciously right around the time 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 there’s a sort of anthropic looming—not in the shadows, I mean, they’re a lot here—but they’re very successful on the corporate side of things.

It feels like these guys are competitors, and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I wonder if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their progression in the company and in a way these two companies are definitely coming to exist side by side and they’re really not directly competing with each other – maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we originally thought of them?

Anthony: I think they compete directly with each other. There is definitely a scenario where if 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 two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other just fades into obscurity.

And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems that OpenAI, more than anyone else, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic’s progress.

Our reporter Lucas [Ropek]he did a great piece over the weekend about the HumanX conference talking to everyone there and they’re like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine too,” but like they were all about Claude Code. And I think that’s exactly what OpenAI is concerned 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 there’s the most money, and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.