OpenAI Acquires TBPN

An AI company owning a major tech podcast?

Wow, what’s next?

Ecommerce giants owning major newspapers? An aerospace company owning a microblogging platform? Startup accelerators owning tech news aggregators?

I bet OpenAI genuinely believes they're using their money to help free media exist. And TBPN genuinely believes this is the right choice for economic freedom so they can continue to operate. I bet they even had a convo such as "we'll never tell you what to say," and both sides genuinely believed it.

But this never ends well. Even if there's never a conversation about it, directly, the implication is there.

I don't care about TBPN, specifically. I just really, really wish we had a better way for media to fund itself independently. (And I say this as someone who pays for some media, but not nearly enough. I don't have $10/mo for every outlet that deserves it.)

EDIT: sama basically said what I said he would: https://x.com/sama/status/2039773740586918137

Had to double check this wasn’t a late April Fools joke. Each weird acquisition or product launch feels like an implicit admission that anything like “AGI” is never coming.

I don't understand this at all. 58.2K youtube subs and under 3k views on most videos. This seems like they have barely just started?

TBPN, OpenClaw and Astral - that's 3 high profile acquisitions in a month. I smell a PR push to be seen as the 'good guys'.

I don't buy it. The leaked emails and actions of OpenAI's leadership point to a cynical growth machine.

The winner of this AI cycle will fund the lobbies that decide the politics of the future. OpenAI gives me a 'must escape the permanent underclass' energy. Not the energy I want from possibly the most influential people of the near future.

To be honest, until a month ago, I hadn't even heard of TBPN or seen any of their content. But, seemingly, out of nowhere, they managed to get all the leaders in AI to appear in their programming.

The core of the information they present isn't much different than what you'd hear on Dwarkesh or other industry podcasts, the presentation is some weird mix of ESPN and Mad Money that I personally don't get, but maybe makes sense to a US audience.

I don't see why that is interesting to OpenAI, but maybe I'm missing something.

I've never heard of TBPN but it appears to be an AI sports network of some sort??

Sooo....why the hell is the TBPN website so InfoWars-coded?

"airs weekdays from 11–2pm PT"

This is one of those moments where I turn out to be entirely out-of-touch with the rest of humanity, because I cannot imagine being able to spend 3 hours every day watching some livestream news show!

Is this is the younger alternative to having Fox News playing on the TV all day?

With intense competition for enterprise contracts coming from Anthropic, I thought this was OpenAI's time to get _less_ memey, not more. What the hell are they thinking?

Maybe it's just me but as soon as something like this, that should be independent, is owned by something it reports on, it becomes something you need to automatically trust less.

The only logical step for Anthropic now is to buy the Dwarkesh Patel podcast

All of the ads are gone from the stream?!

As a viewer I don’t think this is in my interest as I think they will get a lot less prestige guests now. They have interviewed some huge names recently.

I misread that acronym as TBDN, which made me wonder why they'd bought The Beef and Dairy Network podcast...

What.

Should start a new AI company just hoping to cash in on the gold rush.

attention is all you need

I have made a commitment to reduce my overly long and excessively hedged comments on here, so, if I may: What the heck. Is this a belated April fools joke?

This is not what a company on the precipice of AGI or even one that has faith in LLMs being a consistent growth driver across the industry would realistically do.

Is this a good investment financially? I don't know and seeing as I have never heard of TBPN before this post, I am not the right person to gauge that.

But any investment, be it in building your own Social Networks (Sora 2), a news show or anything else beyond model training is frankly, to me at least, a clear admission that OpenAI does not see nearly as much value in models as they have been selling investors on.

Considering the rest of the economy, that is more terrifying than any "AI will kill us" prediction.

If OpenAI believed even a tenth of what they have tried to sell investors, governments and the public on, they'd not have a penny to invest in anything akin to this, plain and simple.

I thought they acquire the pirate bay.

I have lost faith in sama and openai management.

This interview is very in-depth look at the TBPN business:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/35L5nxL7VSmHIuaArgdCx1

They are intentionally making something like Bloomberg TV, with a very specific tech news audience and with some of the playbook of twitch streamers - growing via clipping -- but a look and feel of Cable news shows.

They mention squawk box on CNBC many times, as competition, in the interview and that they have no problem with filling ad inventory for their 3+ hours of programming a day.

since tbpn is known for their quite oblique satire. i wonder if this is some long April 1st thing.

Will they maintain the hard right political angle?

Why though? Great for the TBPN crew.

Sam has extraordinary business sense.

TBPN seems like the media equivalent of Soylent. Oh wait...

What is TBPN? It looks like some sort of scam or parody of a podcast when I got to their site.

Even if it’s legit and I’m just old enough to not understand modern aesthetics, why would OpenAI be spending any sort of money on media at all?

April fool!

Straight from the Bezos Washington Post playbook