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OpenAI has been all over the news recently, whether that news is about acquisitions<\/a>, competition with Anthropic<\/a>, or bigger debates about AI\u2019s impact on society<\/a>.<\/p>\n On the latest episode of TechCrunch\u2019s Equity podcast<\/a>, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O\u2019Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company\u2019s latest acquisitions seem to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested they also address \u201ctwo big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.\u201d<\/p>\n First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company may be hoping to\u00a0 come up with a product that has \u201cmore hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.\u201d And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to \u201cbetter shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great.\u201d<\/p>\n Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.<\/p>\n Anthony: <\/strong>[We have] two deals that are worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro<\/a>. And that comes after another deal that was literally announced when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn\u2019t get to talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN<\/a> \u2014 a business talk show, like a new media company.<\/p>\n And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These are not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they\u2019re interesting because it suggests that there\u2019s still this [attitude of,] \u201cLet\u2019s try out different things.\u201d<\/p>\n Especially [with] the TBPN deal [\u2026] particularly at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we\u2019re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> Is running a tech talk show, should that really be on the to-do list?<\/p>\n Kirsten:<\/strong> No, this should not be on the to-do list. That\u2019s it.\u00a0<\/p>\n I do want to mention Hiro because to me, that\u2019s an interesting one, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, she wrote about this and was I think the first to write about it. She dug in a little bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, \u201cBy this date, you won\u2019t be able to access this anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this absolutely is about getting talent on board. So I\u2019m very curious to see if OpenAI is going to be just absorbing them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they\u2019re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it\u2019s not really clear.<\/p>\n Sean:<\/strong> I think you look at both of these as acqui-hires to a certain extent. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, allegedly they are going to retain their editorial independence on the show that they make every day. And all respect to those guys who\u2019ve put that out there and gotten it off the ground so quickly and grown it into what it has become.<\/p>\n I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like that and you put the people who make the show under the org of the public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up at the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether or not saying \u201ceditorial independence\u201d is enough. It\u2019s not an incantation that just works.<\/p>\n But you know, what\u2019s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI is facing.<\/p>\n One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As far as whether or not that will actually ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that\u2019s not raising the largest 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 enterprise side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, \u201cWhat else can we do?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak of creating consumer apps, and so this seems to me like a bet on them being able to come up with something else that may have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.<\/p>\n And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great and certainly is under more questions now than just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow just led a report at The New Yorker<\/a> that dropped suspiciously right around the time that this and a couple other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.\u00a0<\/p>\n I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.<\/p>\n Kirsten:<\/strong> So the thing that you didn\u2019t say is, there\u2019s Anthropic kind of looming in \u2014 not in the shadows, I mean, they\u2019re very much taking up a lot of space here \u2014 but they\u2019re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things.<\/p>\n It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I\u2019m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their stride in enterprise and in a way, these two companies are clearly going to coexist and they\u2019re really not directly competing with each other \u2014 maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them?<\/p>\n Anthony:<\/strong> I think they\u2019re directly competing with each other. There\u2019s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope for, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the one and two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will just fade into obscurity.\u00a0<\/p>\n And again, none of this is official, but there\u2019s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic\u2019s rise.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n