OpenAI isn’t just buying a podcast — it’s buying influence
By Hadas Gold, Brian Stelter, CNN
(CNN) — OpenAI’s out-of-the-blue acquisition of TBPN, the buzzy online talk show, stunned the worlds of media and technology. But it’s a continuation of a pattern that dates back a hundred years, to 1926, when RCA created NBC in part to sell radios.
Time and time again, pioneers of new platforms have also bought up content and influenced conversations about those platforms.
In this case, a live-streaming show with a small but loyal and influential audience — known as a chummy platform for tech entrepreneurs to chat, where executive moves are treated like sports trades, where AI is a constant topic of conversation — will be bankrolled by one of the leading AI companies.
In an interview with CNN, OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane cited that long history of “companies and entities owning and acquiring media properties,” harkening to the days of Westinghouse Electric owning CBS and Microsoft partnering with NBC to launch MSNBC.
Lehane compared the TBPN deal to news outlets hosting sponsored content and sports teams having dedicated channels.
And he said the deal is about messaging. The TBPN hosts, while continuing their daily live-streamed show, will also help the ChatGPT maker with marketing and communications.
“These guys at TBPN have really cracked the code, particularly as it relates to a really core audience, but an incredibly important audience within AI — of developers, of builders, of entrepreneurs, thought leaders in AI,” Lehane said. “It’s really based around not scooping or breaking news, but sort of breaking down the ideas that are behind AI, the how and the why.”
“We want to let these guys cook,” he added, “and the idea is to really scale what they can do and how they do it, so that they are able to really continue to deliver those ideas but to bigger and bigger audiences, particularly as it becomes more and more important to explain the how and the why behind AI.”
Many observers, like The New York Times’ Silicon Valley correspondent Mike Isaac, said TBPN amounts to a form of marketing for OpenAI.
“At a time when consumers are growing increasingly skeptical of the effects of AI on society,” Isaac wrote on X, “I see this as a marketing expense.”
Lehane told CNN that having TBPN’s marketing and communications skills in-house will help as “we build out some of our own franchises and our own channels,” suggesting OpenAI will be doing more in the media space.
Does ‘editorial independence’ matter here?
OpenAI approached TBPN with the acquisition idea earlier this year. It was spearheaded by Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications.
The companies did not disclose the terms of the transaction. Lehane declined to comment on a Financial Times report that the deal was in the “low hundreds of millions.”
The contract with OpenAI includes guarantees for editorial independence, Lehane said. TBPN president Dylan Abruscato posted on X that the show will retain full control over all its editorial decisions and branding.
But “OpenAI’s promise of editorial independence for TBPN is irrelevant,” The Information’s Martin Peers wrote last night. “Independence for what purpose? Can you imagine TBPN doing a hard-hitting piece on OpenAI? It’s not in the show’s DNA. That’s fine. There’s a place for techies to talk with other techies.”
The Information founder Jessica Lessin summed it up this way: Elon Musk “has X,” and now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “has TBPN.”
Curious timing?
Last month, OpenAI raised eyebrows when it shut down its AI-generated video social media app Sora amid a refocus on compute-heavy core business products.
On Thursday, Lehane brushed off a question about whether TBPN is a new “sidequest” for OpenAI.
“We’re focused on where we allocate our compute,” Lehane said, referring to the high cost each AI task eats up. “TBPN has nothing to do with compute.”
The-CNN-Wire
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