‘Chasing vibes’ — OpenAI M&A strategy gets more confusing with TBPN

Over 10 months after shelling out an eye-popping $6.4 billion for Jony Ive’s nascent devices startup, OpenAI announced another surprising deal on Thursday, snapping up a media business that streams a three-hour daily tech talk show.

For a company that’s facing intensifying investor scrutiny as it racks up billions of dollars in losses tied to its infrastructure buildout, OpenAI’s M&A strategy is tough to pin down. After the startup, now valued at over $850 billion, announced it purchase of Technology Business Programming Network, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a Thursday post on X that, “TBPN is my favorite tech show.”

“I don’t expect them to go any easier on us, am sure I’ll do my part to help enable that with occasional stupid decisions,” Altman wrote.

It’s a pivotal moment for OpenAI, which is prepping for an IPO as soon as this year. The company’s core products — its popular artificial intelligence models and ChatGPT chatbot — face intensifying competition from Google, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI, which is likely to hit the public market first through the anticipated offering of SpaceX.

OpenAI has been reeling in its spending expectations and last month shuttered its Sora video app that quickly went viral after its launch six months earlier. It’s not readily clear how TBPN fits into OpenAI’s strategy, but the AI market is moving so quickly that the most logical moves today may make little sense tomorrow.

“When you have more and more disruptive competitors showing up, they need to build things that give people a unique reason to pick ChatGPT over other AI platforms,” Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum Group, said in an interview. “They are kind of chasing vibes a little bit.”

While not all of OpenAI’s acquisitions will pay off, Newman said the company, fresh off a $122 billion funding close, can afford to experiment. He called TBPN “a fairly small bet for a lot of attention.”

OpenAI didn’t disclose deal terms. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.

OpenAI’s biggest deal to date by far was the purchase of Ive’s io, which pushed the company into the complex world of hardware development for the first time. Ive is legendary in the space for designing the iPod, iPhone, iPad and many other gadgets in his years at Apple, and is angling to get OpenAI’s first devices to market as soon as next year.

In December, OpenAI hired Google’s Albert Lee to lead corporate development, a sign that the company was on the hunt for more targets. It’s purchased several startups across a range of industries since then, including software startup Astral, cybersecurity startup Promptfoo, and health-tech startup Torch. 

OpenAI’s last big splashy acquisition came in the form of a developer rather than a company. In February, the company hired Peter Steinberger, the Austrian software developer behind the viral AI assistant OpenClaw. Much like the…