OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT and vanguard of the new wave of disruption sweeping through the economy, has taken a break from buying other artificial intelligence firms to invest in a daily three-hour online chat show.
On Friday, OpenAI said it had bought the Technology Business Programming Network, which has 11 employees and airs a marquee show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, for an undisclosed amount reportedly in the “low hundreds of millions”.
While TBPN’s viewership numbers are low relative to other popular influencers and livestream channels, it has become a favourite of Silicon Valley executives, making the purchase a potential vehicle for OpenAI to shape perceptions of artificial intelligence.
OpenAI executive Fidji Simo, who oversaw the development of Facebook’s stories and news feed functions in her time at that company, suggested to employees in a memo that the purchase would help OpenAI spread its views.
“One thing that’s become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us,” Simo said. She said the show would help OpenAI “create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates – with builders and people using the technology at the centre”.
As well as conducting interviews and discussing news items, Coogan and Hays discuss arguments made by their audience and others in the AI space, such as marketers’ use of AI-generated memes.
The writer’s example was a fake video of actor Paapa Essiedu fighting the late Alan Rickman in a UFC match, which he said countered racist negativity around Essiedu being cast in the new Harry Potter series. The video showed Rickman punching and knocking out Essiedu. Coogan and Hays were impressed by the quality of the video.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman is a fan of the show. He also invested in Coogan’s first company, the dystopian meal replacement formula Soylent, which launched in 2013, was halted briefly in 2016 because it made people sick, and was sold in 2023 for $7.8 million. And even though TBPN has hosted flattering interviews with OpenAI competitors including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Altman said he wasn’t taking control of the content.
“I don’t expect them to go any easier on us”, he said in a social media post. “[I] am sure I’ll do my part to help enable that with occasional stupid decisions.”
Why the buy?
So why purchase the company if you’re just going to let it keep going in the same direction it’s already going? The likely answer is that OpenAI, along with other AI and tech companies, desperately needs the positive press, and that it has an interest in making sure TBPN stays around.
Several tech leaders have expressed a mistrust of traditional media, or in the case of serial entrepreneur Elon Musk and senior venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an open hostility. AI in particular is facing increased scrutiny as public sentiment appears to sour on the category, more companies are pulled into regulatory scuffles, more serious ethical quandaries emerge, and the amount of money and resources going towards the technology becomes truly immense. Even fans of some AI products have become disenfranchised by frequent changes, such as the surprise shuttering of OpenAI’s Sora video generation model.
So it does make sense for OpenAI, which is valued at $US850 billion ($1.2 trillion), to want to support TBPN. Coogan and Hays are insiders. They understand the founder mentality and are enthusiastically positive about “builder” stories where small teams find a way to make billions selling innovative products. They’re anti-regulation. They’re optimistic about AI and crypto, but in a business sense, which sets them apart from other influencers shilling and boosting AI to consumers.
Andreessen has urged tech leaders to become the media, controlling which messages are pushed to an audience and how. Last year, he acquired the tech podcast network Turpentine. Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it as X. Salesforce founder Marc Benioff (another recent guest on TBPN) bought Time magazine in 2018. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013. Most recently, Oracle founder Larry Ellison has been driving the growth of Paramount Skydance, including an upcoming acquisition of Warner Bros.
Google already owns YouTube, and Meta already owns Instagram, which gives them their own influence on news. And practically every tech giant is pushing to have their AI agents digest and mediate news from the web to feed directly to the audience. All of this taken together means that, down the track, pro-technology voices could dominate platforms.
And to that end, there could be more to OpenAI’s TBPN acquisition than there appears on the surface.
If OpenAI has designs on creating its own AI news system, the talk show provides a perfect test case and an ideal initial set of training data. The company now owns hundreds of hours of discussion, which it could match against public data like X posts and RSS feeds, to build a model of how announcements and posts become informative and engaging conversation. Then, a 24-hour news channel staffed mostly by AI, but with real news and real interviews, becomes viable, with clips and summaries generated on demand.
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Tim Biggs is a writer covering consumer technology, gadgets and video games.Connect via X or email.
