OpenAI has acquired popular tech industry talk show TBPN — Technology Business Programming Network — making this the AI giant’s first acquisition of a media company. The show will report to OpenAI’s chief political operative, Chris Lehane.
TBPN, hosted by former tech founders John Coogan and Jordi Hays, is a daily live show that airs on YouTube and X for three hours, focusing on tech, business, AI, and defense.
The show has gained a cult following in Silicon Valley, a safe space where industry power players can speak candidly and be questioned by fellow insiders. The show has a reputation for being something of a Sports Center for the tech industry — a place where top tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Marc Benioff, and, yes, Sam Altman, come to chop it up, react to the news of the day, and occasionally make some of their own.
TBPN will continue to live on as its own brand, which OpenAI will help scale. Not that it necessarily needed help on that front; TBPN has grown into an empire that’s on track to pull in more than $30 million this year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
OpenAI already has its own podcast for long-form conversations with the people building tech at the company.
OpenAI will also tap the founders’ “amazing comms and marketing instincts” outside the show, according to OpenAI’s head of AGI deployment, Fidji Simo, who said TBPN will “bring AI to the world in a way that helps people understand the full impact of this technology on their daily lives.”
Simo went even further, noting that TBPN’s prowess is necessary for an atypical company like OpenAI where “the standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply.”
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She said TBPN will have editori …