'Chasing vibes' — OpenAI's M&A strategy gets more confusing with TBPN purchase

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 . Read more CNBC tech news SpaceX confidentially files for IPO, setting stage for record offering Five key questions Apple faces entering its second half-century Baidu robotaxis reportedly halted mid-traffic causing crashes in Wuhan, China Iran threatens Nvidia, Apple and other tech giants with attacks 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 litt...