OpenAI’s existential questions | TechCrunch

OpenAI has been in the news lately, whether that news concerns acquisitions, competition with Anthropicor 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 did our best to bring together all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions appear to be classic acquisitions, Sean suggested they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is currently trying to solve.”

First, the company hopes to work with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro to come up with a product that has “more leverage than just a chatbot, and perhaps something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could try to “better shape its public image, which hasn’t been great lately.”

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

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 as we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we couldn’t talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN – a business talk show, like a new media company.

And I think both deals are quite small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These aren’t things that people expect will really change the direction of their business or anything like that, but they are interesting because it suggests that things like this are still out there. [attitude of,] “Let’s try different things.”

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

Does running a tech talk show really have to be on the to-do list?

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

I do want to mention Hiro because that’s an interesting one to me because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, wrote about this and I think was the first to write about it. She has looked into it a bit and actually this looks like a takeover. The company is folding. They basically said, “You won’t have access to this anymore by this date.”

This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So it’s definitely about getting talent on board. So I’m really curious to see if OpenAI will just take them on air at OpenAI, or if they’re actually 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 look at both of these as acquisitions to some extent. I mean, acquiring TBPN would allow them to maintain their editorial independence in the show they create every day. And all respect to those guys who put that out there and got it off the ground so quickly and allowed it to grow into what it has become.

I think anyone who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism: If you acquire something like this and you put the people who make the show under the organization of the public policy and communications or marketing people of adjacent people higher up at the company doing the acquisition, you might have some good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not an incantation that just works.

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

One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. Whether that will ever make 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. And they also seem to be having trouble keeping up with the business side where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like an attempt at, “What else can we do?”

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

And then TBPN is an acquisition that was made to better represent what the company does and to better shape its public image, which hasn’t been great lately and is certainly raising more questions now than it did a few weeks ago because Ronan Farrow just led a report in The New Yorker that dropped suspiciously around the time this and a few other OpenAI announcements came out last week.

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

Kirsten: So what you didn’t say is that there’s an anthropic species emerging – not in the shadows, I mean, they’re taking up a lot of space here – but they’re having a lot of entrepreneurial success.

It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in many ways. Anthony, I’m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] they’re just on a path to entrepreneurship and in a sense these two companies will clearly co-exist and not really compete directly with each other – maybe on talent, but not necessarily in the way we originally thought them?

Anthony: I think they compete directly with each other. There is certainly 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 the one and the two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will simply fade into oblivion.

And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting about how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone else, is obsessed with and angry about the rise of Anthropic.

Our reporter Lucas [Ropek]he wrote a great piece this weekend about the HumanX conference where he talked to everyone there and they said “yeah, ChatGPT is fine too” but like it was all about Claude Code. And I think that’s exactly what OpenAI is concerned about.

Because in theory there could be many more opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth zone, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.