The purchase happened „earlier this year”. The announcement arrived yesterday. Between those two points came months in which OpenAI owned the company and nobody outside knew - and nobody was obliged to know, because nothing in the rules requires a private company to say who it bought and when.

The acquired company is called NextSlide and did one fairly narrow thing: from a prompt, notes, documents or research it assembles a finished presentation that can then be edited. Founder Ahmed Beshry describes the goal on his site as making „visual communication more accessible so more people can express their ideas clearly”. The team, he says, will continue the same mission at OpenAI.

What did it cost? Nobody knows. The terms were not disclosed, which for a private acquisition is normal and is exactly why it is the most conspicuous missing piece. Without a price there is no way to judge whether this is buying a product, buying a team, or quietly clearing a competitor off a field OpenAI plans to enter on its own.

Beshry's biography helps. Before NextSlide he co-founded Caper AI - a company making smart shopping carts and checkout-free stores, bought by Instacart in 2021. That is a second founder exit through a sale rather than through a company built to last. In Silicon Valley that does not count as failure; it counts as a craft.

What is more interesting is that OpenAI, a company worth more than a good part of Europe's stock exchanges, is buying a firm whose business is - making slides. Either the calculation is that office work is the next big field, or that it is cheaper to buy a team that has already solved one such problem than to solve it yourself. Most likely both. Just note that they are not even trying to sell the story as a vision any more: the announcement arrived several months late, through a LinkedIn post.