OpenAI's Media Buying Spree: What's an AI Company Doing in the News Business?
The company that makes ChatGPT just bought a tech publication, and I'm not sure anyone's asking the right questions about why.
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I was having coffee with a former colleague from my Kuka days last week when he forwarded me the news: OpenAI acquired TBPN, some tech media outfit I'll admit I'd never heard of. My first thought was, why does a company building AI models need to own a news publication?
Look, here's the thing. I've spent most of my career around industrial automation, not media conglomerates, but I know what vertical integration looks like when I see it. When Fanuc started buying up vision system companies in the 90s, we all understood the play. They wanted to control the whole stack. This feels... different, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it.
The official line from OpenAI's blog is that they want to "accelerate global conversations around AI and support independent media." That's a nice sentiment. But independent from whom, exactly? The company signing the cheques? I called my old colleague at Siemens (who's moved into tech investing these days) and he laughed. "Bob, independent media owned by a trillion-dollar AI company. That's a good one."
Maybe I'm being too cynical. OpenAI has been making noise about partnering with publishers rather than just scraping their content. They've got deals with Axios and apparently "hundreds of newsrooms" according to their partnership announcement. That's something, I suppose. Better than the alternative.
What's interesting to me is the timing. OpenAI just announced they've hit 1 million business customers. That's not nothing. When I was at Kuka, we celebrated hitting 100,000 installed robots like we'd won the World Cup. A million paying businesses is serious scale.
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