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.)
> I just really, really wish we had a better way for media to fund itself independently.
I agree, but this is 100% not the right model. Altman is not the right person to be in control of a media organisation. He shows little willing to understand anything of how the world works currently, let alone something out of his wheel house.
Right, it's simple mathematics. It costs X energy units to raise a human to adulthood, and Y energy units to train a frontier language model. What's so hard about this?
TBPN had almost all the big AI names in there, and they were extremely friendly. This would have been a problem anyway. They are not the "tough questions" kind of place.
You can unfortunately see this across the media spectrum. There seem to be basically two paths:
1. Cozy up to the big money in your industry, have them on for PR interviews with easy questions, and eventually get sponsored / acquired by them. I hesitate to even call this journalism, it’s more just sponsored entertainment.
2. Build a personal brand as someone known for being particularly critical / investigative / etc. This will undoubtedly make you far less money, and you’ll probably end up shilling ads for gold coins in between asking for Patreon supporters.
I’ve always wondered if a government-funded (in a way that cannot be manipulated) organization whose sole purpose is to criticize everyone would ever work. It might even need to be run anonymously.
It doesn’t work for that either. That’s the point. It’s akin to looking at a Texan middle grade schoolbook and then concluding everything significant was invented in America.
I think it's possible to listen and discover things (e.g. companies I don't know) without further succumbing to opinions or other comments about those companies.
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?
> 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?
This is how German system works actually. So, it DID HAPPEN. The German government has only some control over the budget but the actual media companies control the content themselves. Every resident has to pay a monthly contribution. This is a contribution to an independent account / budget for media only. It is not a tax that goes into a common pot that politics can decide to take out.
There are national outlets like ZDF, Tagesschau, Deutschlandradio and regional ones like Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Bayerischer Rundfunk. Each design and present their own programmes.
> There are national outlets like ZDF, Tagesschau, Deutschlandradio and regional ones like Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Bayerischer Rundfunk. Each design and present their own programmes.
Well yes, but calling them politically independent is a bit of a stretch. A 2024 study found 52% of board members (Rundfunkrat) have a party membership (~2% of the general population is part of a party). [0]
To take one example you mention, the ZDF-Fernsehrat is dominated by party members (33/60).Notably only by the conservative party (CDU/CSU) and the SocDems (SPD), with 2 green members and 1 member of the SSW. Neither the left party, nor the far right AfD have any representation, despite accounting for roughly 30% of the national vote. Religious communities have signifigantly more representation (9), than the scientific community (0). [1]
Public media was always a tool to help create and maintain a societal overton window of shared truth and identity, and as such very helpful in keeping Germany united and democratic. There was however also always clearly immoral and untrue directions taken for ideological reasons or political convenience, for example the support of Apartheid South Africa til its fall, and the recent biased coverage of Israel. Many other topics as well, like immigration, covid and the war in Russia, are presented in a way that does not align with significant amounts of the german population: We are currently witnessing this overton window breaking apart completely, in other words, German public media has failed in its primary purpose.
Maybe I'm biased as an American, but if this were to be proposed here, who decides which outlets are blessed with the government money and the corresponding air of legitimacy of being an official public broadcaster?
I would like to see a system like New York's campaign finance vouchers, where individual citizens get to decide where the public funds are directed. That way you have to have an audience and you have to appeal to people's sense of what's truly valuable, rather than just trying to farm views.
> 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?
Why not fill all government positions via random selection? The ancient Athenians thought that if your government officials were chosen by a process other than sortition, you don't have a democracy.
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.
The CPB, the legal entity that the government actually funded (and which in turn supplied some of the funding for PBS/NPR and its stations) had its funding rescinded by Congress (under HR4 last year), and has since shuttered.
It's not clear how, even under that recent ruling, that rescission will be undone.
Reincorporate? You can just do things. Direct a human to take the required meatspace actions as the judiciary to recreate whatever legal entity previously existed, open a bank account, fund it, and start distributing funds.
If you need the Treasury to initiate the EFT and they refuse to, send law enforcement to effectuate the funds transfer.
In this case, you cannot simply force Congress to appropriate money to a reincorporated CPB -- unless you were to get a second ruling from a judge that the rescission was unconstitutional.
The Trump EO was deemed unconstitutional because he specifically called out that it didn't like the "left-wing propaganda" (his words) in PBS/NPR programming. Congress's rescission is ostensibly for budgetary reasons -- even if we all know in our heart that they were following Trump's orders.
What we can do is elect a Congress that will revive the CPB. Here's hoping.
PBS brings on Brooks Capehart to discuss politics. Having two partisan players from opposite sides of spectrum is a good way to get some balance. The fact that they agree so often on the fundamentals tells me the US is cooked.
Ahem, their reporting on nuclear power was often non-scientific and just plain wrong. In fact anything having to do with the environment was generally pretty poor from a factual and scientific basis. Their reporting on politics was consistently rated as one of the most extreme in the US media.
I do wish they could do a 'just the facts' reporting as I think that is worth some taxpayer money to support. But by any measure, from any media watchdog, they were one of the most extreme and least accurate media source. That you can't see that says a lot more about you than PBS/NPR. Hell, there are 20 year old SNL skits mocking their coverage for its very narrow POV.
This is partially the case in Italy, though it changed over the years.
The assignment of funds is based on refunding prints/sales, so money goes to help newspapers that do print "something" of interest to the public.
The problem is that people don't want "independent" journalism, they want "my ideas" journalism.
Which.. still good somehow? Italy had plenty of newspapers which were the literal extension of political parties and a few independent ones in the past and still does.
There's no way a popular show like that needs money, they were probably millionaires already with sponsorships. Why are we pretending these people are poor or need help to survive?
What does this even mean? Who is being "genuine"? This is far to naive a take for a company thats burning through hundreds of millions of dollars, and constantly striving to set the tone of AI and their own supremacy.
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.
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 point to a cynical growth machine.
The winner of this AI cycle 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 possibly the most influential people of the near future.
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.
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?
"I'm also excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team. They've helped many brands market online and because they have a strong pulse on where the industry is going, their comms and marketing ideas have really impressed me. I can't wait to leverage their talent outside of the show [...]."
So there's a large acquihire component here. Maybe the dominant component.
It really feels like OpenAI simply acquires anything AI adjacent that is trendy or allows financial analysts to argue that we just don’t understand Sam Altman’s 39D chess strategy.
How does acquiring a relatively unknown niche podcast align with their mission ?
Their mission statement: Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.
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.
This has got to be a joke at this point, and at worse some kind of financial scheme for Altman friends & family. What's next? Will I wake up to an announcement OpenAI is acquiring Joe Rogan's podcast?
I thought this was supposed to be the year of "focus". They just shut down one money pit (Sora) but apparently still have money to buy some random tech podcast most people have never heard of?
At this point I don't feel sorry for them, they deserve everything that's coming for them.
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.
Such a ridiculous set of acquisitions from OpenAI and the state of the market in general. A trillion dollar company buying 50k subscriber Youtube shows that happened to ride the hype train, while teams spend decades of their live perfecting something dreaming about a fraction of an exit.
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?
When does the 24 hour agent news network start? Programming by agents for humans and agents. Sora talking heads scraping articles and generating content. I’d find human to agent or agent to agent live interview segments interesting.
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.
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.
192 comments
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
> I just really, really wish we had a better way for media to fund itself independently.
I agree, but this is 100% not the right model. Altman is not the right person to be in control of a media organisation. He shows little willing to understand anything of how the world works currently, let alone something out of his wheel house.
the segways to the ad reads are always one of their funniest bits
> "we'll never tell you what to say,"
TBPN had almost all the big AI names in there, and they were extremely friendly. This would have been a problem anyway. They are not the "tough questions" kind of place.
1. Cozy up to the big money in your industry, have them on for PR interviews with easy questions, and eventually get sponsored / acquired by them. I hesitate to even call this journalism, it’s more just sponsored entertainment.
2. Build a personal brand as someone known for being particularly critical / investigative / etc. This will undoubtedly make you far less money, and you’ll probably end up shilling ads for gold coins in between asking for Patreon supporters.
I’ve always wondered if a government-funded (in a way that cannot be manipulated) organization whose sole purpose is to criticize everyone would ever work. It might even need to be run anonymously.
I think it's possible to listen and discover things (e.g. companies I don't know) without further succumbing to opinions or other comments about those companies.
>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
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?
> 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?
This is how German system works actually. So, it DID HAPPEN. The German government has only some control over the budget but the actual media companies control the content themselves. Every resident has to pay a monthly contribution. This is a contribution to an independent account / budget for media only. It is not a tax that goes into a common pot that politics can decide to take out.
There are national outlets like ZDF, Tagesschau, Deutschlandradio and regional ones like Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Bayerischer Rundfunk. Each design and present their own programmes.
See more details on: https://www.rundfunkbeitrag.de/welcome/english
> There are national outlets like ZDF, Tagesschau, Deutschlandradio and regional ones like Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Bayerischer Rundfunk. Each design and present their own programmes.
Well yes, but calling them politically independent is a bit of a stretch. A 2024 study found 52% of board members (Rundfunkrat) have a party membership (~2% of the general population is part of a party). [0]
To take one example you mention, the ZDF-Fernsehrat is dominated by party members (33/60).Notably only by the conservative party (CDU/CSU) and the SocDems (SPD), with 2 green members and 1 member of the SSW. Neither the left party, nor the far right AfD have any representation, despite accounting for roughly 30% of the national vote. Religious communities have signifigantly more representation (9), than the scientific community (0). [1]
Public media was always a tool to help create and maintain a societal overton window of shared truth and identity, and as such very helpful in keeping Germany united and democratic. There was however also always clearly immoral and untrue directions taken for ideological reasons or political convenience, for example the support of Apartheid South Africa til its fall, and the recent biased coverage of Israel. Many other topics as well, like immigration, covid and the war in Russia, are presented in a way that does not align with significant amounts of the german population: We are currently witnessing this overton window breaking apart completely, in other words, German public media has failed in its primary purpose.
[0] https://www.medienpolitik.net/aktuelle-themen/die-politik-is...
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZDF-Fernsehrat
> 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?
Why not fill all government positions via random selection? The ancient Athenians thought that if your government officials were chosen by a process other than sortition, you don't have a democracy.
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5768399/npr-pbs-trump-f...
It's not clear how, even under that recent ruling, that rescission will be undone.
If you need the Treasury to initiate the EFT and they refuse to, send law enforcement to effectuate the funds transfer.
The Trump EO was deemed unconstitutional because he specifically called out that it didn't like the "left-wing propaganda" (his words) in PBS/NPR programming. Congress's rescission is ostensibly for budgetary reasons -- even if we all know in our heart that they were following Trump's orders.
What we can do is elect a Congress that will revive the CPB. Here's hoping.
I agree that everyone has, by definition, some bias, but NPR/PBS tend to avoid editorialization significantly more than their counterparts.
I do wish they could do a 'just the facts' reporting as I think that is worth some taxpayer money to support. But by any measure, from any media watchdog, they were one of the most extreme and least accurate media source. That you can't see that says a lot more about you than PBS/NPR. Hell, there are 20 year old SNL skits mocking their coverage for its very narrow POV.
1. https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/andrew-yang-the-most-meme-...
The assignment of funds is based on refunding prints/sales, so money goes to help newspapers that do print "something" of interest to the public.
The problem is that people don't want "independent" journalism, they want "my ideas" journalism.
Which.. still good somehow? Italy had plenty of newspapers which were the literal extension of political parties and a few independent ones in the past and still does.
But these days, they are all dying anyway.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_eWdX4qBUyQ3D
> I bet OpenAI genuinely believes
What does this even mean? Who is being "genuine"? This is far to naive a take for a company thats burning through hundreds of millions of dollars, and constantly striving to set the tone of AI and their own supremacy.
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 don't buy it. The leaked emails and actions of OpenAI's leadership point to a cynical growth machine.
The winner of this AI cycle 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 possibly the most influential people of the near future.
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?
"I'm also excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team. They've helped many brands market online and because they have a strong pulse on where the industry is going, their comms and marketing ideas have really impressed me. I can't wait to leverage their talent outside of the show [...]."
So there's a large acquihire component here. Maybe the dominant component.
Their mission statement: Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.
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?
I thought this was supposed to be the year of "focus". They just shut down one money pit (Sora) but apparently still have money to buy some random tech podcast most people have never heard of?
At this point I don't feel sorry for them, they deserve everything that's coming for them.
This is genuinely sad to see; people do not have a sense of autonomy and identity, it seems.
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.
Wow, what’s next?
Ecommerce giants owning major newspapers? An aerospace company owning a microblogging platform? Startup accelerators owning tech news aggregators?
> Technology Business Programming Network
This sounds like a fake podcast they would make fun of on Silicon Valley
Edit: it gets even better, "Coogan is co-founder of meal replacement company Soylent"
https://youtu.be/MesrrYyuoa4?t=235
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.
Without attention you're nothing.
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.