OpenAI acquires NextSlide team to work on ChatGPT
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NextSlide, a startup specializing in AI-powered presentation tools, announced that its team had joined OpenAI to work on ChatGPT, in a deal whose financial value was not disclosed. Founder Ahmed Bashri, who previously co-founded Caper AI, which was acquired by Instacart in 2021, explained in a memo on the company’s website that their product aimed to turn texts, notes, documents or research into a polished, editable presentation and make visual communication easier for everyone.
The acquisition, which took place earlier this year, according to Bashri, comes amid a race among major AI labs to acquire talent specialized in generative user-interface capabilities. NextSlide was not selling a language model but a product experience: how a user takes a raw idea and produces a presentation ready for delivery within minutes. This application layer, from prompt to the coordinated visual output, is what OpenAI needs to deepen ChatGPT’s integration into professionals’ daily workflows, not just developers.
What this means for developers and producers in the region:The wave of acquisitions of application-layer teams indicates that value is shifting from raw models to user experience. Companies in the Gulf, Egypt and Morocco that build products on the major models’ APIs will see competition intensify from within those models’ own labs, as OpenAI no longer limits itself to selling tokens but is building the end product.
Conclusion:A founder who previously built and sold an AI-powered e-commerce startup is now joining OpenAI’s product team with a full squad. The more important point is not the deal itself but the direction of the major labs: a full-stack grasp of the value chain from model to interface, leaving a narrower space for independent companies that build wrappers around the models themselves.