OpenAI Acquires TBPN

boringg

Why though? Great for the TBPN crew.

huslage

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

asadm

attention is all you need

faangguyindia

I thought they acquire the pirate bay.

Topfi

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.

suriya-ganesh

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

chvid

April fool!

_jab

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?

csmiller

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.

phillipcarter

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

gkoberger

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

sefrost

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_have_an_idea

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.

lovich

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?

hmokiguess

Straight from the Bezos Washington Post playbook

operatingthetan

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?

mlinsey

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?

BoredPositron

Sam has extraordinary business sense.

brentm

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.