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OpenAI Acquires TBPN
- boringg 7mo agoWhy though? Great for the TBPN crew.
- rvz 7mo ago> Why though? It got your "attention", which is what they (OpenAI) are after. > So rather than trying to recreate that ourselves, it made a lot of sense to bring them in, support what they’re doing, and help them scale—while keeping what makes them special. OpenAI was losing attention to Anthropic because of Claude Code, so they raised money and are trying to buy it back.
- Philpax 7mo agoWhat.
- huslage 7mo agoI've never heard of TBPN but it appears to be an AI sports network of some sort??
- minimaxir 7mo agoEssentially yes. It only has traction on X, but in the AI world that is all that is necessary. (its engagement metrics are poor for its size on all other platforms)
- phillipcarter 7mo agoSort of. There's a lot of activity now in other places: - Reddit has a ton of exciting content about local models - Bluesky has some interesting developers toying with memory and social media bots since it's an open platform (unlike X) However, most leaders in the AI space all post on X and sam altman + the sv investor class are all hopelessly addicted to it.
- SyneRyder 7mo agoI just recently switched away from Bluesky to reluctantly checking back in to X, for the first time since the acquisition. It feels like all the AI information is on X, it's basically necessary. Bluesky is better than Mastodon for AI, and I'd rather be on a platform where it's more open and I can at least use whatever client I want. I love what Hailey & Cameron are doing on Bluesky and I miss chatting to Penny & Void. But Bluesky felt like being in a rural country town, and X was like a major city. Turns out it isn't just hearing relevant information that's important, but the speed with which you hear it. Half the time Bluesky was just screenshots of X anyway. I gave up on Bluesky at the point where Anthropic / Claude got its designation from DoW, and no-one on Bluesky even cared. I'm still bitter about that.
- plaguuuuuu 7mo agowhat do you even do on X, you basically just subscribe to a bunch of blowhards to get insider sloppy seconds, then occasionally yell into the void and hope someone (anyone) finally responds?
- SyneRyder 7mo agoWhat I found is that the "For You" algorithm on X was better than I thought. Yes, it starts off as terrible, and remains terrible without very careful steering. I'm treating X as read-only and not interacting. But after liking a few posts by Amanda Askell, Simon Willison, Ethan Mollick, Boris Cherny and others, I was immediately getting far better AI information than I was on Bluesky, from accounts beyond the ones where I'd liked their posts. That isn't necessarily a high bar, but at least it was people actively using AI, people who are positive about the things that can be made with it. I'm more likely to hear about new model releases that I won't hear about elsewhere. At least on X, I'm going to hear people talking about Claude Mythos, and I'll hear about the Nicholas Carlini talk [1] where Claude Mythos is finding & reporting CVEs in the Linux kernel. On Bluesky, my time was being spent fighting off anti-AI university professors who were still in the "stochastic parrot" phase. They were genuinely convinced AI models couldn't even write code that compiles, let alone entire working programs that solve problems. I'm not trying to persuade you or anyone else to use X, and I'd really rather not be using X myself. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd26pWhfmg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd26pWhfmg
- mertleee 7mo ago[dead]
- brentm 7mo agoI've seen it mentioned before but never checked it out. It def has ESPN vibes but I think it's more like a new Techcrunch.
- phrotoma 7mo agoThe extremely uninformative website isn't helping much. There's a more info button that provides no info whatsoever.
- asadm 7mo agoattention is all you need
- faangguyindia 7mo agoI thought they acquire the pirate bay.
- Topfi 7mo agoI 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.
- travelalberta 7mo agoI think there will be an AI correction and OpenAI will be the center of it. I have no clue what their plan is, they seem to throw everything at the wall an nothing sticks. Gonna take MicroSlop down with them. Anthropic and Google will come out the other end in great shape though.
- Topfi 7mo agoPicking winners at this stage is hard, but maybe you are right on Alphabet and Anthropic. The former has use for data centres including those filled with ML hardware in a way MSFT and AWS may not if LLMs crash, simply by virtue of YouTube and other services which have relied on ML long before the hype started. Their buildout also started earlier and that may help them not overbuild to keep up with the hype, but who knows. On Anthropic, hard to tell from the outside whether they are just more quite on their buildouts or whether they truly mainly rent their hardware, which could give them some flexibility if the market craters. On MSFT, I'd rather they fix their products, at least to keep their mass of employees from being affected negatively.
- 7mo ago
- chvid 7mo agoApril fool!
- suriya-ganesh 7mo agosince tbpn is known for their quite oblique satire. i wonder if this is some long April 1st thing.
- _jab 7mo agoWith 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?
- df2sdf 7mo agoTheyre not. They have never been focused... actually they were when they first created the market. But since.. nah.
- csmiller 7mo agoHad 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- throwatdem12311 7mo agobut Jensen said we already achieved it!
- MagicMoonlight 7mo agoIt was never coming. Slopchain markov generators are completely unrelated to AGI. They don’t think, they aren’t capable of ever thinking. You need something completely different, which they haven’t figured out.
- mertleee 7mo ago[dead]
- phillipcarter 7mo agoSooo....why the hell is the TBPN website so InfoWars-coded?
- rbtprograms 7mo agooh wow you were not kidding
- polio 7mo agoIt's also slow as hell. It takes like 200ms for the social media buttons to change color upon hover.
- duskdozer 7mo agoyup. open the page, fans start revving up.
- QuadmasterXLII 7mo agoI visited it to find out what the hell a tbpn is and abjectly failed
- brap 7mo agoI couldn’t put this into words so thank you for that
- sureglymop 7mo agoI've read this word 50 times in this thread so far and still don't know what it is an acronym for...
- echoangle 7mo agoWikipedia says it means "Technology Business Programming Network"
- gkoberger 7mo agoI 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 https://x.com/sama/status/2039773740586918137
- coloneltcb 7mo agosay what you will about TBPN, but it was never objective journalism
- swyx 7mo ago(and the fact that they proudly wore it on their sleeve and shone a lamp on it is complete and absolute genius)
- grvdrm 7mo agoIn a way it also looks like a16z buying their own marketing blog/news unit. Echo chamber. I happen to like listening to TBPN for discovery purposes.
- MrSkelter 7mo agoIt doesn’t work for that either. That’s the point. It’s akin to looking at a Texan middle grade schoolbook and then concluding everything significant was invented in America.
- grvdrm 7mo agoSorry - what doesn't work? Discovery? I think it's possible to listen and discover things (e.g. companies I don't know) without further succumbing to opinions or other comments about those companies.
- sefrost 7mo agoAll 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_have_an_idea 7mo agoTo 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.
- hrldcpr 7mo agoI would guess that the whole "manosphere" phenomenon helped cryptocurrencies and Trump, so probably can help OpenAI too?
- bargainbin 7mo agoFunny, this gave me strong manosphere vibes as well, despite ostensibly not being about using misogyny to extract wealth from incels.
- gkoberger 7mo agoAmerican here. I'm equally confused, but I think it's playing into the types of people who were previously into crypto or sports betting or prediction markets. Every sports bar I go to, there's some middle-aged finance bro name referring to "Sam" like they're old friends or talking about how their NVIDIA stock is up. They're confidently predicting markets due to trends. The stock market has been kinda monolithic the past decade or so. Things went up and down, but mostly in sync. AI represents a disruption; billion dollar companies can go to zero overnight and the right bet can be the next NVIDIA. So, this show matches that vibe. tl;dr = it's for gamblers
- mlinsey 7mo agoJust based on the number of very prominent guests they get to do interviews, they clearly have a lot of viewers in influential tech/vc circles, even if their total audience size isn’t huge.
- lovich 7mo agoWhat 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?
- talideon 7mo agoI misread that acronym as TBDN, which made me wonder why they'd bought The Beef and Dairy Network podcast...
- hmokiguess 7mo agoStraight from the Bezos Washington Post playbook
- misiti3780 7mo agocomparing TBPN to the WP is weird
- rchaud 7mo agoMore like Ozy Media, except those guys fumbled the acquisition bag: https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2021-10-05/ozy-media-sued-over-co-founders-goldman-call-impersonation https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2021-10-05...
- operatingthetan 7mo agoI 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?
- SamDc73 7mo agoThey’re more active on Twitter/X, idk what it is about them that every "tech bro" type guy around me follows them, but I never followed them myself, so I was surprised to know they only have 300k on Twitter.
- gordonhart 7mo agoThey're primarily a Twitter phenomenon and get circulated quite widely within the tech sphere there.
- disiplus 7mo ago[dead]
- aswegs8 7mo agoNot sure either, it seems like OpenAI has more money than they can spend and just looks for outsized bets.
- tantalor 7mo agoNever heard of it.
- ohong 7mo agoTBPN was also reportedly on track to do $30M in sponsorship revenue this year, up from $5M last year. Audience size is modest but targeted & high value per viewer (mostly decision makers in tech).
- sidrag22 7mo agoseems about right. They came across as the yes men of podcasts for tech people that want to pretend they are doing no wrong, maybe i just chose a really rough 10 minute section of a random podcast though, but not one moment did they not come across in that manner.
- mlinsey 7mo agoAn 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?
- yieldcrv 7mo agostates should remove the "purpose" field of incorporation statutes, its too antiquated now and for half a century
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- bfeynman 7mo agoRobinhood did exact same thing, it's more for marketing reach and distribution stuff. Wouldn't be surprised in few years they let it go or spin it down, just paying for a funnel/some narrative control
- angrydev 7mo agoWait a second...
- operatingthetan 7mo agoShouldn't OpenAI be focused on becoming profitable and surviving the next 2 years instead of buying podcast toys?
- kingleopold 7mo agoAI will eat all Media, all of it.
- Topfi 7mo agoIf the vast majority of CEOs in this industry are to be believed, any company that achieves "AGI" will be undefeatable, their model improvements and research findings impossible to catch up to. Why risk that being Anthropic, Moonshot or any other competitor to OpenAI by spending your money on this? The few months/years before "Everyone dies", wouldn't OpenAI want to be the "Anyone" that "build it" and is in control during that time? Unless, of course, OpenAI does not actually believe in that being a possibility, as suspected when they were working on social media...
- BoredPositron 7mo agoSam has extraordinary business sense.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- brentm 7mo agoMaybe 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.
- screye 7mo agoTBPN, 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.
- a_victorp 7mo agoThey are probably preparing for an IPO
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- delfinom 7mo agoThey are busy funding age verification lobbying already https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/01/openai-ai-kids-safety-coalition/ https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/01/openai-ai-kids-safety-coal...
- charcircuit 7mo agoOpenClaw was not acquired. The creator of it was hired by OpenAI, but OpenClaw is still independent.
- brimal 7mo agoShould start a new AI company just hoping to cash in on the gold rush.
- simonw 7mo ago"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?
- mkmk 7mo agoYes but also think of it as 'generates content from 11-2pm PT, with each hour giving 12+ small clips that have the chance to be shared, go viral, etc.'
- swyx 7mo agothis is the correct answer. the stream is just the production process, not the full product.
- mlinsey 7mo agoIt's CNBC for Silicon Valley - a combination of good background noise, a broad survey of what people are talking about around the valley, and occasionally really great interviews. They get a lot of guests to do interviews that they wouldn't do elsewhere, in part because they are unabashedly and unapologetically cheerleaders - pro-tech, pro-VC, pro-startup, pro-Big-Tech, etc. They don't grill you like an old-school journalist would about whatever the latest political controversy is, they ring a giant gong when their guest brings up a cool traction or fundraising number. I would never use it as my only source of news for what's going on in tech, but with a lot of other tech journalism covering the downsides or problems with the industry, there is definitely a niche for them.
- internet101010 7mo agoLike most streaming, it's what is referred to as "second monitor content". You have it on in the background.
- TZubiri 7mo agoSome ideas. 1- That's roughly around lunch break, including central time and to a lesser extent ET. 2- Lots of people put podcasts in the background, while coding, running, cooking, eating. Especially with airpod-like products. 3- Lots of people watch the clips/highlights and go to the source if needed. It's more a format where the unedited version is posted because technology allows it, which ends up as more transparent than just publishing the edit. In journalism a lot can go on in an edit. I don't think anyone is rawdogging the 3 hours without any multitasking
- game_the0ry 7mo agoI have lost faith in sama and openai management.
- adamgordonbell 7mo agoThis interview is very in-depth look at the TBPN business: https://open.spotify.com/episode/35L5nxL7VSmHIuaArgdCx1 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.
- wahnfrieden 7mo agoWill they maintain the hard right political angle?
- louiereederson 7mo agoTBPN seems like the media equivalent of Soylent. Oh wait...
- blueblisters 7mo agoThe only logical step for Anthropic now is to buy the Dwarkesh Patel podcast
- seydor 7mo agoNo they should buy the All-in podcast and make them talk shit about the admin
- owenthejumper 7mo agoThey are too busy making money
- johnwheeler 7mo agoSounds like OpenAI trying to control another narrative.
- minimaxir 7mo agoFrom the Techmeme summary of the Financial Times (paywalled): https://www.ft.com/content/4fe4972a-3d24-45be-b9fa-a429c432b08e https://www.ft.com/content/4fe4972a-3d24-45be-b9fa-a429c432b... > Source: OpenAI bought TBPN, which was set to generate $30M in 2026, for "low hundreds of millions of dollars"; OpenAI says TBPN will be editorially independent wut
- clueless 7mo ago60K followers on youtube for low hundreds of millions? seems steep
- plaguuuuuu 7mo agoguarantee one of them caught an OpenAI guy murdering a prostitute or something
- kklisura 7mo agoTBPN > Prof G Pod > BG2 Pod > All-In Podcast
- bad_haircut72 7mo agocalling it now that OpenAI changes strategy to instead of building actual AI / anything themselves they just raise lots of capital and buy anything promising in/around the AI space.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- robotresearcher 7mo agoDon't overlook the penultimate paragraph: "I'm also excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team. They've helped many brands market online and because they have a strong pulse on where the industry is going, their comms and marketing ideas have really impressed me. I can't wait to leverage their talent outside of the show [...]." So there's a large acquihire component here. Maybe the dominant component.
- tantalor 7mo ago> acquihire What else would there be? It's a podcast. They have no assets.
- tantalor 7mo ago> Technology Business Programming Network This sounds like a fake podcast they would make fun of on Silicon Valley Edit: it gets even better, "Coogan is co-founder of meal replacement company Soylent"
- hokkos 7mo agoApril fools or self-dealing ?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- qwertyuiop_ 7mo agoHow does acquiring a relatively unknown niche podcast align with their mission ? Their mission statement: Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.
- sidrag22 7mo agoWell, they need to ensure AI advances, and that means advancing the podcast that will pretend that popular opinion is absurd and big tech is always right.
- df2sdf 7mo agoErm people are not stupid, especially the investing community. Methinks this is one of those moments where we will look back and say: Oh Sam facepalm.
- philipwhiuk 7mo ago> Erm people are not stupid, especially the investing community. Yes, yes they are. It's not a community. It's a herd.
- iandanforth 7mo agoFirst I'm hearing of them and with this ownership I'll be highly skeptical of any of their content if I do happen to watch.
- Atomic_Torrfisk 7mo agoShouldnt the product speak for itself? Why do you need to buy a press team. I mean litteraly, with all the AI podcasts out there just get it to do it. It was going to take all our jobs anyways or something.
- rvz 7mo agoPerplexity preparing to acquire Quartr in response to this in three, two, one
- dana321 7mo agoThe attention economy, that is the game - there isn't anything else to it now. Without attention you're nothing.
- qwertyuiop_ 7mo agoI hope when we look back at 2026 this is not the "Big Short moment" https://youtu.be/MesrrYyuoa4?t=235 https://youtu.be/MesrrYyuoa4?t=235
- elAhmo 7mo agoSuch a ridiculous set of acquisitions from OpenAI and the state of the market in general. A trillion dollar company buying 50k subscriber Youtube shows that happened to ride the hype train, while teams spend decades of their live perfecting something dreaming about a fraction of an exit.
- yalogin 7mo agoWhat is tbpn, a podcasting company? Why would OpenAI want that? How is this helping them attain profitability or further their ai market capture?
- downrightmike 7mo ago'buy everything to build the castle' thing companies do before they implode.
- noman-land 7mo agoPR team.
- ncr100 7mo agoI speculate OpenAI wants to shape the "AI" narrative via Media Capture.
- throwatdem12311 7mo agolol public opinion is in the toilet so they buy a propaganda arm. Typical
- _2d30 7mo agoA real loss.
- Eufrat 7mo agoIt really feels like OpenAI simply acquires anything AI adjacent that is trendy or allows financial analysts to argue that we just don’t understand Sam Altman’s 39D chess strategy.
- skeeter2020 7mo agoMaybe he's playing a friendly game against Trump of 4-dimentia chess?
- CompoundEyes 7mo agoWhen does the 24 hour agent news network start? Programming by agents for humans and agents. Sora talking heads scraping articles and generating content. I’d find human to agent or agent to agent live interview segments interesting.
- 6DM 7mo agoThis channel is less than 2 years old, <60k subs, most of their videos have low view rates... I don't get it. Is this a joke?
- QuadmasterXLII 7mo agowhat does tbpn even stand for?
- georgel 7mo agoThey were called "Tech Bro Podcast Network" but rebranded at some point.
- dwa3592 7mo agoI literally did not know TBPN existed and I am gonna forget about it in the next minute.
- Marciplan 7mo agosilly.
- thelastgallon 7mo agoI saw the first comment "free media" and thought TBPN is The Pirate Bay Network.
- voidfunc 7mo agoNever even heard of TBPN but congrats!
- xyst 7mo agoopen ai acquires an somewhat media established group to push their corporate propaganda. Got it.
- shrubble 7mo agoOpenAI helps fund Axios, also, BTW.
- Andrey28 7mo ago[dead]
- elliottlovell88 7mo agoYo this is a sweet website
- tyre 7mo agohow does that explain the "why would OpenAI buy them?" question? OpenAI has better relationships with every VC than these guys do. And why does OpenAI care about funding announcements, which trail actual fundraises by weeks or months?
- Topfi 7mo agoIt's not like the current CEO of OpenAI ran arguably the most desirable VC until a few years ago...
- minraws 7mo agoWtf is TBPN?
- yubainu 7mo ago[dead]
- dfordp11 7mo ago[dead]
- moezd 7mo agoMore acquihiring for the AI gods, for they will never be satisfied until all shall bow to them.
- doctorpangloss 7mo agowho?
- lexcamisa54 7mo agothought The
- nickgreg 7mo agoGood for the TBPN team! I think their genius wasn't in having the best info, it was that they made tech people feel like celebrities.
- bugsense 7mo agoWhy could OpenAI feel the need to control the narrative?
- seydor 7mo agoSama wants to be elon without going public or before going public. Next up, underwater datacenters and more fusion energy slop
- ath3nd 7mo ago[dead]
- haritha-j 7mo agoAltman just taking another step down his slow transformation into Jeff bezos.
- monaco37 7mo agoNext step: OpenAI acquires CNN for a more "open" conversation about AI. This is genuinely sad to see; people do not have a sense of autonomy and identity, it seems.
- amadeuspagel 7mo agoGenuinely thought this would be an April Fools joke. But this is the kind of tech media we deserve for using paywall bypassers and ad blockers.
- iamleppert 7mo agoThis has got to be a joke at this point, and at worse some kind of financial scheme for Altman friends & family. What's next? Will I wake up to an announcement OpenAI is acquiring Joe Rogan's podcast? I thought this was supposed to be the year of "focus". They just shut down one money pit (Sora) but apparently still have money to buy some random tech podcast most people have never heard of? At this point I don't feel sorry for them, they deserve everything that's coming for them.