It’s Greg Brockman’s Open AI now | The Verge
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Sam Altman is still CEO, but in day-to-day operations, his second in command is running the show.
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Sam Altman is still CEO, but in day-to-day operations, his second in command is running the show.
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Open AI has had a hell of a year. The company spent months battling former co-founder Elon Musk in a sensational jury trial, was hit with a high-profile trade secrets lawsuit from Apple, and faced widespread scrutiny after an unreleased model hacked another AI company. As it prepares for an IPO, a steady string of executives have departed, including some of the company’s biggest names.
Throughout it all, one person has quietly amassed power: Greg Brockman.
Brockman is currently Open AI’s president and co-founder. He’s helped lead Open AI since its inception, described as an “engineering workhorse that pushed to build scaled-up systems that would train the AI and make it work” during the company’s early days. He’s also been ambitious from the start, famously musing in a personal journal in 2017, “Financially what will take me to $1B?” (His current stake in Open AI is worth nearly 30 times that.) But at that point he shared power with a handful of cofounders, like chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, as well as CEO Sam Altman.
Now, though Brockman’s title hasn’t changed in years, his purview and job description have expanded significantly. He’s essentially now second-in-command at the company — and, when it comes to day-to-day operations, the big boss.
High-level figures have been leaving Open AI all year, but April is when the departures really picked up. That month saw the exit of Bill Peebles, former head of Sora; Kevin Weil, VP of Open AI’s science arm; and Srinivas Narayanan, CTO of B2B applications. Two others separately departed citing medical reasons: CMO Kate Rouch and Fidji Simo, Open AI’s CEO of AGI deployment — who went on leave in April before officially stepping down in July. The changes have continued. Earlier this month, CRO Denise Dresser, who had taken on a slew of additional responsibilities after the April shakeups, suddenly announced her departure after just eight months. Days later, Brad Lightcap — who had been in charge of “special projects” for a few months, but before that was Open AI’s longtime COO — announced he would leave to start “something new.”
Open AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
He’s essentially now second-in-command at the company — and, when it comes to day-to-day operations, the big boss
Several of these departures — like those of Rouch, Peebles, and Weil — didn’t seem to directly affect Brockman’s position. But others expanded his authority. When Simo went on medical leave, Brockman took charge of all things product, including leading Open AI’s super app efforts.
That role took on even greater significance the following month, after Open AI underwent yet another executive reorganization to focus on growing revenue. The change put Brockman not only in charge of product strategy, but also the company’s entire “scaling” arm, giving him authority over virtually every part of its commercial operation. Simo’s official departure, just weeks after Open AI officially filed to IPO, solidified that arrangement. Notably, when Dresser departed last week, a quote from Brockman — rather than CEO Sam Altman — was included in the press release about the changes; he wrote that the company would “build out the full system to make AI broadly useful for people and businesses.”
To outside observers, the changes demonstrate Open AI’s growing focus on chasing revenue as its IPO approaches, as well as fostering products that will differentiate it from rival Anthropic. Big shifts in executives’ scope of work tend to be a “signal towards where the company is headed strategically,” Harrison Rolfes, a senior research analyst at Pitch Book, told The Verge. “When you have someone like Greg Brockman, for example, he’s more of a product scale and commercial sort of guy. He has a deep technical knowledge that essentially will collapse certain decisionmaking layers.”
The change put Brockman not only in charge of product strategy, but also the company’s entire “scaling” arm
It also may naturally translate to some departures among lower-level employees, said Rolfes: “Whatever he says goes [now] … If, let’s say, you’re below Brockman and you don’t agree with his approach but you’re a lead researcher, whatever it may be, you’re not going to work there anymore — you’re going to say, ‘I’m going to leave.’”
Brockman’s authority is exceeded only by Altman — who undertook a deliberate consolidation of power after clashing with Open AI’s board in 2023. The two didn’t always agree in Open AI’s early days: Brockman sometimes sided with Sutskever in difficult decisions about power dynamics, questioning some of Altman’s ambitions, although he also worried about Musk “steamrolling” Altman. But he’s generally stayed close to Altman personally and professionally. When Altman was ousted from his CEO role in November 2023, Brockman immediately resigned in solidarity and began making plans for a new AI endeavor with him. Since then, the two have only seemed to become more aligned.
Any centralization of power has practical benefits for Open AI, allowing it to cut some of its most expensive salary payouts to help its balance sheet, says Ross Carmel, a partner at Sichenzia Ross Ference Carmel (SRFC). “When you’re going into an IPO, particularly for a company like Open AI, who is lagging behind Anthropic in terms of revenue, you want to decrease those expenses so that this way, you’re either more profitable or closer to profitable,” he said. However, he added, “While it’s not unusual to see high-level execs leave a company just prior to a public listing, I think the fact they’re all in this small time period — that part is unusual.”
Although experts told The Verge the executive departures were more intense than usual and could raise red flags, Brockman said Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that nothing was amiss. “There have been different eras where we have different sets of leaders in place … I’m a constant, Sam [Altman] is a constant, and that, I think that we are stronger because of that resilience and diversity.”
“In order for Open AI to be successful and really differentiate themselves from Anthropic, they need hardware and consumer products to sell to consumers, and that’s what Greg does well.”
Brockman’s own constant has been translating Open AI’s research into practical products. Back in 2020, he celebrated Open AI’s GPT-3 and its developer API as “the first time that [Open AI has] had a general-purpose AI system that’s immediately commercially valuable—it’s actually useful.” Fast-forward more than five years, and these products need to end up profitable as well.
SRFC’s Carmel said Open AI likely hopes Brockman can deliver consumer revenue instead of just trying to catch up with Anthropic on enterprise. “In order for Open AI to be successful and really differentiate themselves from Anthropic, they need hardware and consumer products to sell to consumers, and that’s what Greg does well.” Rolfes predicted that Open AI would develop some sort of consumer product under Brockman’s oversight by the end of September, so that he could “show that he deserves that position.”
“That’s the biggest worry that a lot of public investors have now,” Rolfes said. “They’re going to say, ‘Hey, does Greg have what it takes to run more of Open AI, and is Open AI building this institution that can operate without really depending heavily on him — on both Greg and Sam?’”
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