OpenAI’s existential questions | Tech Crunch

OpenAI has been all over the news, whether it’s about recent acquisitions, competition from Anthropic, or the larger debate 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 round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisition appears to be a classic acquisition, Sean suggests it also solves “the two big existential problems that OpenAI is currently trying to solve.”

First, with the team at personal finance startup Hiro, the company will be hoping to come up with a “product that has more appeal than just a chatbot and is probably worth paying more for.” And new media startup TBPN will allow OpenAI to explore ways to “better shape its image in the public eye, which hasn’t been great lately.”

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

Anthony: (We) have two deals worth mentioning. One is that OpenAI acquired a personal finance startup called Hiro. And that came after another deal that was announced literally when we were recording the last 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. This is interesting because it suggests that people aren’t really expecting to change the direction of their business, but there is still this attitude of “let’s try something different.”

Especially (with) the TBPN deal (…) Especially at this point where it feels like OpenAI, in all the reports we’re reading, is trying to refocus on making ChatGPT and GPT models competitive in an enterprise environment with programmers.

You’re hosting a tech talk show, but should that really be on your to-do list?

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

The reason I want to mention Hiro is because it’s interesting to me. Because our venture editor, the incredibly talented Julie Bort, wrote about this and I think I was the first person to write about it. She did a little digging and basically it looks like this is an acquisition hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “No more access until this date.”

This is a personal finance startup. And they were released just two years ago. So this is absolutely about securing talent. So I’m very curious whether OpenAI is going to absorb them into the ether of OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. It’s not very clear to me.

Sean: I think you see these two as somewhat acquisition hires. What I mean is, with the TBPN acquisition, they will maintain editorial independence for the shows they make every day. And all my respect to the people who put it out there and started it so quickly and grew it into what it is today.

I think anyone who follows the media should have a healthy skepticism about whether it’s good enough to say “editorial independence” when you’re acquiring something like that and putting the people who make the show in public policy and communications organizations, or marketing it to the higher-ups in the acquiring companies. It’s not just a spell that works.

But what’s interesting to me about these two is that while they are similar in terms of acquisitions, I think they both represent the two main problems that OpenAI is facing.

One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product at ChatGPT. Whether it can actually make enough money to be a sustainable business to keep things going without attracting the largest private investment in the world is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up with the corporate side of things where the real money appears to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like a test of “what else can we do?”

The person who founded Hiro appears to be a serial entrepreneur creating consumer apps. So this seems like a bet that they will be able to come up with something else that has more appeal than a simple chatbot and is worth paying more for.

And TBPN is an acquisition made to better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the eyes of the public. It hasn’t been great lately and it’s definitely raising more questions than it did a few weeks ago. That’s because Ronan Farrow’s report in The New Yorker dropped this and several other announcements from OpenAI as suspicious when they were published last week.

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

Kirsten: So what you’re not saying is that there’s a humanity kind of thing looming. Not shadows, I mean they’re taking up a lot of space here. But they’re having a lot of success on the corporate side.

These people feel like competitors and in many ways feel like very different companies. Anthony, do you see this as direct competition with OpenAI? Or (they) will find their own progress in the enterprise and in some way these two companies will definitely co-exist and not actually compete directly with each other. Maybe it’s about talent, but not necessarily what we initially thought?

Anthony: I think they are in direct competition with each other. If AI, as an industry and as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope, there’s certainly a scenario in which either could be a very successful company, or both. And the success of one doesn’t necessarily mean the other will fade into obscurity.

And again, none of this is official, but there have been plenty of reports that 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. He talked to everyone there and they said, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine too,” but they all seemed to be about Claude Code. I think this is what OpenAI is worried about.

Because while theoretically there may be many other opportunities for generative AI, it feels like the biggest areas of growth, where there’s the most money and where we can at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, are in these enterprise and coding tools.