Robinhood did exact same thing, it's more for marketing reach and distribution stuff. Wouldn't be surprised in few years they let it go or spin it down, just paying for a funnel/some narrative control
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.)
Obviously this will never happen, but what do you think about a system where there's a "media" fund from the government that gets distributed to several independent media outlets?
The decision on who and how much to fund gets decided by a randomised group in the population, like jury duty, maybe every 2 years?
I don't know if this could potentially make the media companies worse at reporting facts as they would try and raise money by appealing to people, but with enough competition it should sort its self out as long as there's no outside funding?
I mean, in theory I like this. But look what happened to NPR and PBS; it was ultimately at the behest of the president. They lost their revenue for not saying the "right" things.
It would end worse if OpenAI's cash bubble bursts because they aren't yet profitable, and it doesn't seem like Sam's goal is to ever achieve profits, only obscure circular deals that have quietly gone away in some ways. I wouldn't trust Bill Clinton alone with my sister, in the same spirit, I wouldn't trust Sam Altman with any of my finances, companies, etc.
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.
TBPN, OpenClaw and Astral - that's 3 high profile acquisitions in a month. I smell a PR push to be seen as the 'good guys'.
I don't buy it. The leaked emails and actions of OpenAI's leadership to a cynical growth machine.
The winner of this AI cycle will will fund the lobbies that decide the politics of the future. OpenAI gives me a 'must escape the permanent underclass' energy. Not the energy I want from what will be the most influential people in the coming decades.
idk what it is about them that every "tech bro" type guy around me follows them, but I never followed them myself, so I was surprised to know they only have 300k on Twitter.
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.
Just based on the number of very prominent guests they get to do interviews, they clearly have a lot of viewers in influential tech/vc circles, even if their total audience size isn’t huge.
That's true, but a lot of these people are also competitors. I can't imagine it'll be attractive going to the OpenAI media channel to talk about Gemini or Grok.
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.
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)
This is one of those moments where I turn out to be entirely out-of-touch with the rest of humanity, because I cannot imagine being able to spend 3 hours every day watching some livestream news show!
Is this is the younger alternative to having Fox News playing on the TV all day?
Yes but also think of it as 'generates content from 11-2pm PT, with each hour giving 12+ small clips that have the chance to be shared, go viral, etc.'
It's CNBC for Silicon Valley - a combination of good background noise, a broad survey of what people are talking about around the valley, and occasionally really great interviews.
They get a lot of guests to do interviews that they wouldn't do elsewhere, in part because they are unabashedly and unapologetically cheerleaders - pro-tech, pro-VC, pro-startup, pro-Big-Tech, etc. They don't grill you like an old-school journalist would about whatever the latest political controversy is, they ring a giant gong when their guest brings up a cool traction or fundraising number.
I would never use it as my only source of news for what's going on in tech, but with a lot of other tech journalism covering the downsides or problems with the industry, there is definitely a niche for them.
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?
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.
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 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.
Picking winners at this stage is hard, but maybe you are right on Alphabet and Anthropic. The former has use for data centres including those filled with ML hardware in a way MSFT and AWS may not if LLMs crash, simply by virtue of YouTube and other services which have relied on ML long before the hype started. Their buildout also started earlier and that may help them not overbuild to keep up with the hype, but who knows.
On Anthropic, hard to tell from the outside whether they are just more quite on their buildouts or whether they truly mainly rent their hardware, which could give them some flexibility if the market craters.
On MSFT, I'd rather they fix their products, at least to keep their mass of employees from being affected negatively.
They are intentionally making something like Bloomberg TV, with a very specific tech news audience and with some of the playbook of twitch streamers - growing via clipping -- but a look and feel of Cable news shows.
They mention squawk box on CNBC many times, as competition, in the interview and that they have no problem with filling ad inventory for their 3+ hours of programming a day.
It got your "attention", which is what they (OpenAI) are 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.
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?
Shouldn't OpenAI be focused on becoming profitable and surviving the next 2 years instead of buying podcast toys?
Robinhood did exact same thing, it's more for marketing reach and distribution stuff. Wouldn't be surprised in few years they let it go or spin it down, just paying for a funnel/some narrative control
Wait a second...
states should remove the "purpose" field of incorporation statutes, its too antiquated now and for half a century
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
Obviously this will never happen, but what do you think about a system where there's a "media" fund from the government that gets distributed to several independent media outlets?
The decision on who and how much to fund gets decided by a randomised group in the population, like jury duty, maybe every 2 years?
I don't know if this could potentially make the media companies worse at reporting facts as they would try and raise money by appealing to people, but with enough competition it should sort its self out as long as there's no outside funding?
I mean, in theory I like this. But look what happened to NPR and PBS; it was ultimately at the behest of the president. They lost their revenue for not saying the "right" things.
This was reversed upon judicial review. Checks and balances.
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5768399/npr-pbs-trump-f...
say what you will about TBPN, but it was never objective journalism
It would end worse if OpenAI's cash bubble bursts because they aren't yet profitable, and it doesn't seem like Sam's goal is to ever achieve profits, only obscure circular deals that have quietly gone away in some ways. I wouldn't trust Bill Clinton alone with my sister, in the same spirit, I wouldn't trust Sam Altman with any of my finances, companies, etc.
>I bet OpenAI genuinely believes they're using their money to help free media exist
>TBPN genuinely believes this is the right choice for economic freedom
Company literally sold to someone else, we now conclude they believe to achieve economic freedom.
>Company genuinely believing anything.
Yep, it is 2026 and words mean nothing in, we better ooga booga or something
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.
TBPN, OpenClaw and Astral - that's 3 high profile acquisitions in a month. I smell a PR push to be seen as the 'good guys'.
I don't buy it. The leaked emails and actions of OpenAI's leadership to a cynical growth machine.
The winner of this AI cycle will will fund the lobbies that decide the politics of the future. OpenAI gives me a 'must escape the permanent underclass' energy. Not the energy I want from what will be the most influential people in the coming decades.
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?
They're primarily a Twitter phenomenon and get circulated quite widely within the tech sphere there.
They’re more active on Twitter/X,
idk what it is about them that every "tech bro" type guy around me follows them, but I never followed them myself, so I was surprised to know they only have 300k on Twitter.
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.
Just based on the number of very prominent guests they get to do interviews, they clearly have a lot of viewers in influential tech/vc circles, even if their total audience size isn’t huge.
That's true, but a lot of these people are also competitors. I can't imagine it'll be attractive going to the OpenAI media channel to talk about Gemini or Grok.
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 would guess that the whole "manosphere" phenomenon helped cryptocurrencies and Trump, so probably can help OpenAI too?
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.
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I've seen it mentioned before but never checked it out. It def has ESPN vibes but I think it's more like a new Techcrunch.
The only logical step for Anthropic now is to buy the Dwarkesh Patel podcast
Sooo....why the hell is the TBPN website so InfoWars-coded?
oh wow you were not kidding
"airs weekdays from 11–2pm PT"
This is one of those moments where I turn out to be entirely out-of-touch with the rest of humanity, because I cannot imagine being able to spend 3 hours every day watching some livestream news show!
Is this is the younger alternative to having Fox News playing on the TV all day?
Yes but also think of it as 'generates content from 11-2pm PT, with each hour giving 12+ small clips that have the chance to be shared, go viral, etc.'
It's CNBC for Silicon Valley - a combination of good background noise, a broad survey of what people are talking about around the valley, and occasionally really great interviews.
They get a lot of guests to do interviews that they wouldn't do elsewhere, in part because they are unabashedly and unapologetically cheerleaders - pro-tech, pro-VC, pro-startup, pro-Big-Tech, etc. They don't grill you like an old-school journalist would about whatever the latest political controversy is, they ring a giant gong when their guest brings up a cool traction or fundraising number.
I would never use it as my only source of news for what's going on in tech, but with a lot of other tech journalism covering the downsides or problems with the industry, there is definitely a niche for them.
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?
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.
I misread that acronym as TBDN, which made me wonder why they'd bought The Beef and Dairy Network podcast...
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.
Should start a new AI company just hoping to cash in on the gold rush.
Will they maintain the hard right political angle?
What.
I have lost faith in sama and openai management.
attention is all you need
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.
Picking winners at this stage is hard, but maybe you are right on Alphabet and Anthropic. The former has use for data centres including those filled with ML hardware in a way MSFT and AWS may not if LLMs crash, simply by virtue of YouTube and other services which have relied on ML long before the hype started. Their buildout also started earlier and that may help them not overbuild to keep up with the hype, but who knows.
On Anthropic, hard to tell from the outside whether they are just more quite on their buildouts or whether they truly mainly rent their hardware, which could give them some flexibility if the market craters.
On MSFT, I'd rather they fix their products, at least to keep their mass of employees from being affected negatively.
I thought they acquire the pirate bay.
This interview is very in-depth look at the TBPN business:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/35L5nxL7VSmHIuaArgdCx1
They are intentionally making something like Bloomberg TV, with a very specific tech news audience and with some of the playbook of twitch streamers - growing via clipping -- but a look and feel of Cable news shows.
They mention squawk box on CNBC many times, as competition, in the interview and that they have no problem with filling ad inventory for their 3+ hours of programming a day.
TBPN seems like the media equivalent of Soylent. Oh wait...
since tbpn is known for their quite oblique satire. i wonder if this is some long April 1st thing.
Why though? Great for the TBPN crew.
> Why though?
It got your "attention", which is what they (OpenAI) are 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.
Sam has extraordinary business sense.
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?
April fool!
Straight from the Bezos Washington Post playbook
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