OpenAI IPO Hits Turbulence

**Brian** (0:00)
Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to The Daily AI Show. Today is June 26th, 2026, 10 a.m. on the East Coast, which means we are live as always. We do this Monday through Friday.
Take the weekends off, but we'll be back obviously all next week as well. And we're wrapping up this week. We've had a lot of great conversations with me today, our Beth, Andy, and I'm Brian. I think we might have Gareth or Karl popping as well. We'll see if that happens, but if not, we have tons to talk about. Hey, going in the chat already. Appreciate you being here. Everybody else is joining us as well.
So yeah, I think there's plenty to talk about. So let's get right into it. Beth, Andy, who wants to kick things off?

**Andy** (0:40)
Okay.
I'm mad.
There's a small company, a startup, an AI called Topaz Labs, which has the state of the art really in image upscaling, with retaining the fidelity of a blurry old image. I'm an old guy. I've got a lot of old images. I'm putting all these things together, and I wanted to use Topaz Labs to do the upscaling of my photos. I was going to build it right into the whole stack. Well, they got acquired by Adobe. I saw that. Yeah. So Adobe, as you may know, in order to have access to Adobe tools, whether it's their damn PDF system, which kind of interposes itself every time I try to open a PDF, from that all the way to the creative suite, it's a very expensive multi-product subscription that you have to buy into. That just basically puts a block from using a state-of-the-art component. So a large company, an incumbent in the creative space, has now created a wall around use of the latest and greatest AI tool. Why? Because they could afford to. That's why I'm mad. I'm not going to be able to use Topaz Labs because I refuse to pay for an Adobe subscription package.

**Brian** (2:12)
I would have to imagine that there's free tools out there. I don't know what they are, but I imagine they'll come around. They do something or similar. In fact, I was just watching a TikTok this morning and a guy was like, before AI ruined every social media platform, there were some really good tools out there and so he's just sharing in a slideshow what those different tools are. I was like, I forgot about that one. That's right. It was like Photopea or something like that. It's like the free Photoshop one that's been out there for a long time. It's open source and I don't pay for DaVinci, so I suppose that's open source too, right? I mean, I've been using DaVinci for a long time. But back in the day, I definitely did pay the $50, $49.99 a month for the Adobe Creative Crowd Suite because I needed to.
I haven't had to do that in several years. Yeah, they definitely get you once they want you to be part of that. Now, the one shade I won't throw to Adobe, please don't wrap this in, is it only cost us $10 a month to use their enhancement, their AI voice enhancement, and we use that on every single show, not live, but on the replay, there's some voice enhancement in it.
It really gives a professional tone and feel across us using multiple different mics in multiple different environments. I know for me, this office can echo quite a bit. This mic does a good job once I updated the mic, I don't know, a year ago. That helps, but nothing comes close to the, running it through the enhancer.

**Andy** (3:41)
Yeah, I was wondering why I sound like Robert De Niro in the Modify.

**Brian** (3:45)
Oh yeah, we all sound better, I think.

**Beth** (3:48)
It enhances, but it also cuts down the sounds that the non-voice sounds. It's an enhancer and a D enhancer.

**Brian** (3:59)
It has issues where it'll drop, like if a dog barks, it can clip a little too much of something else.
I'm like, the pain is worth the benefit on that kind of thing. So every once in a while, I'm like, look, we never claim to be professionally edited. We don't have editors that go through and tweak the mics and all that stuff. I listen like Conan O'Brien's podcasts. There's people who are paid clearly to make every pop and every sound go away and be everything so smooth, super smooth. I'm like, that's not what we're doing here. So I love that I have a tool like that. It's like a quick pass, takes about maybe five minutes to do its processing and then redownload. Done and dusted. So what I was going to say is, please Adobe, even though Andy's mad at you, I'm not mad at you for keeping that as a $10 separate fee and not trying to absorb that into the creative suite because that would be soul crushing. Anyway, Beth, you were going to say?