Current OpenAI Questions | Results TechCrunch

OpenAI has been in the news recently, whether the news is imminent shopping, competition is Anthropicor major debates about AI’s impact on society.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcastKirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to find the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s recent acquisitions appear to be acquisitions, Sean also said they address “two big problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”

First, with the team behind Hiro’s financing, the company can hope to come up with something that has “more strings than just chatting, and maybe something worth charging a lot.” And with the launch of the new TBPN TV, OpenAI can look to “improve its image in the eyes of the public, which has not been good recently.”

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

Anthony: (We have) two agreements worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI found a financial startup called Hiro. And this comes after another deal that was announced when we recorded our last episode of Equity, so we haven’t talked about it yet: OpenAI also discovered TBPN – a trade show, like a new media company.

And I think both of these are very small compared to the size of OpenAI. It’s not something that people expect to really change their business or anything like that, but it’s interesting because it shows that there’s (an attitude of,) “Let’s try different things.”

Especially (with) the TBPN collaboration (…) especially at this time that it seems like OpenAI, from all the reports we are reading, is also trying to refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models more competitive for businesses and developers.

Running a technology program, should this be on your to-do list?

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

I want to mention Hiro because to me, it’s interesting, because Julie Bort, our very talented, very talented editor, wrote about it and I think I’m the first to write about it. Did a little digging and actually this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They said, “As of today, you can’t get this anymore.”

This is a financial start. And they only started two years ago. So, this is about getting talent on the field. So I’m interested to see if OpenAI is just going to push them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re interested in some other type of economic activity that they want to work on. To me, it doesn’t make sense.

Sean: I think you look at all of these as acqui-hire to some degree. I mean, the acquisition of TBPN, they say they will retain their control rights over the show they produce every day. And all credit to the guys who put this up and got it off the ground quickly and developed it as it did.

I think that every person who follows the media should have a reasonable suspicion that when you find things like this and put the people who make the show under the group of people and comms or advertising people who are close to the company that produces it, that you can have good questions if you say that “independence” is enough. It’s not just fiction that works.

But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they’re similar in acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two big problems that OpenAI is facing.

One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful feature in ChatGPT. Whether or not this will make them enough money to become a sustainable business that isn’t raising big teams around the world, to keep things going, is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to stay in the real money business, so bringing in a team like this seems like a shot, “What do we do again?”

The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak to create consumer apps, and this seems to me like a bet on them to come up with something that would have more hooks than a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.

Then TBPN and find out where it is made to help better represent what the company does and improve its image in front of the public, which recently was not good and has more questions now than a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow keeps answering. led a report in the New Yorker which dropped suspiciously around the time this and several other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.

I think these are the two main problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.

Kirsten: So the thing that you didn’t say is, there’s an Anthropic brand that’s coming up – not just in the shadows, I mean, they’re taking up a lot of space here – but they’re doing really well in the business side of things.

It feels like these guys are rivals and they also feel like completely different companies in many ways. Anthony, I wonder if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or (are they) just finding their own way of doing business and somehow, the two companies are co-existing and not directly competing – maybe in terms of skill, but not in the way we first thought?

Anthony: I think they are competing directly. There are scenarios where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope, they will both be very successful companies, they can be one and two. And the success of one does not mean that the other will be hidden.

And again, none of this is official, but there have been many reports in which it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone else, is affected and frustrated by the rise of Anthropic.

Our reporter Lucas (Ropek), said a good piece for the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he’s talking to everyone there and he’s like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is cool too,” but like they were all Claude Code. And I think that’s what OpenAI is worried about.

Because again, in theory, there may be many other opportunities for artificial AI, but it feels like the biggest growth, the place where the most money is and where they can see a way to have a sustainable business in the future, is in these businesses and writing tools.