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.)

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?

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.

I would guess that the whole "manosphere" phenomenon helped cryptocurrencies and Trump, so probably can help OpenAI too?

American 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

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?

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.

It seems OpenAi may be jumping the shark at this very moment.

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

Essentially 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)

Sort 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.

Sam has extraordinary business sense.

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

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?

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.

What.

I thought they acquire the pirate bay.

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.

I 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.

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

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?

attention is all you need

Why though? Great for the TBPN crew.

> Why though?

It got your "attention", which is what they (OpenAI) is 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.

April fool!

Straight from the Bezos Washington Post playbook