The 5 minutes that they were going to start a new division of Microsoft were some of the most hilarious 5 minutes in tech history. But Brockman had basically made it clear he was ride or die for Sam. And over time, that has paid off.
I can't even calculate the ratio really of how much power he ended up with. But it's like, what isn't he in charge of really? You know what I mean?
Do you think there's any way that OpenAI looks the same at the end of the year as it did at the top of the year?
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Hayden Field, The Verge's senior AI reporter, about some pure Decoder bait: the seemingly endless org chart changes at OpenAI, and how all of them have seemed to consolidate power under co-founder Greg Brockman, the company's president. While Sam Altman is the CEO and still OpenAI's most public face, Brockman has amassed enormous power and influence within the top ranks of the company as other senior leaders have left in rapid succession these past few months. Brockman now oversees the company's entire consumer and enterprise product teams, including ChatGPT, Codex, and its major infrastructure buildout. As Hayden reported last week, Brockman is now effectively the day-to-day operational leader of OpenAI. This will obviously have major effects on both OpenAI as a company and its product strategy at a time when it continues to cede ground to Anthropic in the enterprise and is preparing for an historic IPO, all against the backdrop of needing to turn a profit in the next few years and the company's huge ambitions to replace both Google Search and the iPhone in the consumer market. So I wanted Hayden to break down for me what's going on at OpenAI and the increasingly important role Greg Brockman will play in its future. Okay, Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field on Greg Brockman's consolidation of power at OpenAI. Here we go. Hayden Field, you're The Verge's senior AI reporter. Welcome back to Decoder.
Thanks. It's great to be here.
Always chaos when you're here, Hayden.
Absolutely. It's like there's never a calm week. If there's a calm week coming up, like I know something's even crazier is coming the next week.
We should just rename the show The Real Housewives of AI.
Yeah, honestly that would be fitting.
Straight up, that's what we should do. A lot of personalities, a lot of feelings, a lot of relationships that people have really come to value over a long period of time.
Yeah, and a lot of lore, a lot of lore that goes between all these people for years and years and years. It's crazy. And now like, you know, they're even putting out profiles on like some of their spouses. Like, yeah, the circles and the people themselves are really interesting.
So today the drama is around OpenAI and specifically Greg Brockman, who seems to be consolidating ever more power at OpenAI. You just wrote a long story about this. It seems very clear that Greg is emerging as sort of the central decision-maker at OpenAI. Describe what's going on.
Greg has obviously been pretty influential at OpenAI for a really long time. But what's different now is that he has so much control over the day-to-day operations in a way he didn't before. You know, he was always a co-founder, he was always heavily involved, you know, it was like him, Ilya Sutskever, and Sam Altman for a long time all like, you know, in these email threads that came out during the Musk v. Altman trial. We saw them all talking about the future of OpenAI, what it should look like, all their strange dynamics with Elon Musk. But now Brockman was in a big picture role before. Now he's increasingly taking on so much power in the day-to-day. Altman has kind of, you know, been focusing more on big picture, IPO stuff, the direction of the company at large. Brockman is, you know, amassing all this power day-to-day as other executives leave. Um, you know, he's been in control now of Codex, um, enterprise stuff, consumer. He's just the pretty much there's four arms of the company right now and he's in control of all of them. So it's been really interesting to see how that's happened over the last few months.
Greg is a character in the AI story, certainly inside of OpenAI. He's been a central figure in a lot of the company's drama over time. So, if you've been paying attention to the AI industry, you're familiar with him. But, if you haven't, explain who Greg is and why he's such a notable figure both in AI and at OpenAI.
Yeah, I mean, he has been on my radar for 7 years now. He's been on other people's for even longer. You know, he dropped out of MIT to join Stripe way back in the day. And then, he was Stripe's CTO during its really early explosive growth phase. So, he left in 2015 to co-found OpenAI. That's kind of how he came on the AI radar. Ever since then, you know, he's been a really influential figure. Him, Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman, they were all heavily involved in the drama with Elon Musk really early on, raising money, trying to lure people over, hire some top talent, figure out who was going to control AGI in the event they ever made it. Lots going on there. And then, yeah, in the years following, you know, Mira Murati joined. And Brockman, Sutskever, Murati, and Altman were kind of the four main players here. They were the most talked about. You saw them in the headlines the most. They had the most power at the company. And then, when the board coup happened in 2023, that's when Brockman kind of flew onto the scene in a new way. He had been kind of behind the scenes a little bit, under the radar. He was not really doing that many public interviews. I interviewed him in 2020, but it's not like he was, you know, a talking head. You weren't seeing that much of him unless you're really watching the company in the industry. But, when Sam Altman got fired by the board, Brockman was so incensed that he quit immediately. And he and Altman were going to start their own thing or eventually kind of lead a department at Microsoft. So, that's when he was making waves in a new way because he was, you know, hell-bent on the drama. He was like, "Okay, if Sam goes, I go." And that's kind of when he became Sam's right hand, I would say, in a new way. Before that, you know, he was just one of the many execs. They were close, but the board coup, I think, made them closer than ever, and that's also what made Sam know that he could trust him in a new way, and thereby, later, kind of green-light him getting more power, probably.
This was a big bet in the politics of the organization. Mira was going to become the new CEO for 5 minutes. Then there was going to be another new CEO, and it was unclear who would stay and who would go. I think justifiably, Altman did not know who he could trust in that moment, except Greg Brockman was like ride or die. Like, I'm leaving. I'm going. We're going to. The 5 minutes that they were going to start a new division of Microsoft were some of the most hilarious 5 minutes in tech history. But Brockman had basically made it clear he was ride or die for Sam, and over time, that has paid off, right? That move has paid off. Even though during that board coup moment, it was not clear that Sam would ever come back.
I remember I was backpacking in Patagonia at the time, and I didn't have a laptop, but I wrote six articles on my phone. It was a crazy time. But yeah, I mean, it seemed like Brockman and Altman were going to be fine, but just be on their own. And then, of course, all the hundreds of employees signing a letter that they would leave if Sam was not reinstated is kind of what got the ball rolling on him coming back, and then kind of pulling an Uno reverse on all the board members who had voted to out him, except one. And yeah, I think that was a big moment that he didn't know who he could trust. Some of the people who he had trusted the most were the ones who voted against him, you know, to be fired. So, you know, I think that went a long way with him that Brockman quit, as well. And yeah, ever since then, we've seen Brockman kind of be positioned in the public eye a little bit more. He's, you know, been in the press more. And then, yeah, this summer is when he really amassed a lot more power after a couple other executives left, and he's now in control of quite a lot of pillars of the company.
And what's really striking is yes, we can talk about 2023 and the board coup and Sam going and coming back and who was going to stay or go then, but actually this year has been more dramatic in terms of executive departures from OpenAI. Just since April, the list is staggering. I'm just going to run down it. Bill Peebles, who ran Sora, Kevin Weil was the head of product at Instagram. He was with the VP of OpenAI's science arm. Mira Murati, who was supposed to be the head of product, was at one point the AGI chief. She left on health leave and then just never came back. Kate Rouch, the chief marketing officer. Srinivas Narayanan, the CTO of B2B. Brad Lightcap, who was the former CEO and the head of social projects. And then just recently, Denise Dresser, the chief revenue officer, too, is an important character if your company is about to IPO. That is a lot of people, and it seems like Brockman just took all of their roles as all of those people left. Is that what's happening here?
More or less. I mean, some of them definitely affected his position less than others. You know, some of them like the CMO leaving, you know, didn't really give him that much more power, etc. But what was interesting is, Mira, the ex-AGI chief of the company, is the one who kind of her absence left a huge gap for Brockman to fill, and he just took over a ton of different aspects. Also, as you just alluded to, you know, a lot of these people had recently, a lot of the people who had just left the company had also recently changed roles. So, it's like essentially more or less, through one way or another, a lot of these people leaving created a power vacuum that Brockman could then kind of capitalize on. Even, you know, it's not like he had this probably master plan of amassing power, but either way, somehow he ended up with a lot of power. And what I think is interesting is like, you know, when Brad Lightcap transitioned roles, for example, one of these other people took over his kind of COO responsibilities. Guess who it was? Dresser. Then she leaves. Okay, now those responsibilities, some of them fall to Brockman. So it's like it didn't all happen cut and dry, but in one way or another, people switching roles and then leaving the company, he ended up with a ton more. Like I can't even calculate the ratio really of how much power he ended up with, but yeah, now he's in control to give you some context of the entire product strategy of the company, which is like obviously incredibly important when you're about to IPO and you're getting a lot of pressure to turn a profit. The whole, the company's entire scaling arm, core product and platform, all of consumer, which is like health, commerce, personal finance, and just, you know, ChatGPT consumer-facing stuff, core infrastructure, ads, data science, and growth. So it's like what isn't he in charge of really? You know what I mean?
That's a lot. I want to talk about Fidji Simo for one more second here. She was the former CEO of Instacart, but before that she was a really high-ranking executive at Meta. She ran the Facebook app. She was in charge of a lot of monetization. When she came to OpenAI, it felt like her role was to turn the consumer version of ChatGPT into a product. And there were lots and lots of people leaving Meta to go to OpenAI for a while, such that basically we had reporting that every all-hands at Meta was about, "What are you going to do about OpenAI? Like they're taking all of our people." You just saw this exodus of people from Meta going to OpenAI in various ways, led by Fidji Simo, in a moment where it felt like what they wanted to do was take on Google as a big consumer product supported by ads. It's funny, Altman actually copped to that ambition on the David Sacks show last week. Here he is giving Peter Thiel credit for saying OpenAI should compete directly with Google. He's like, "The power of this is the power of the Google text box. It's like a text box you can type anything into and it does the right thing. You know, clearly the empty text box works for Google, so why don't you just double down on that?" So, that's pretty straightforward and that's what they did. Altman says they went super hard at it, it being the empty text box, taking on Google's business model, which is one of the best business models in internet history. That was a big bet and it felt like they hired Fidji Simo to go run that bet. She left. That does not seem to be the emphasis anymore. The emphasis is on Codex, on enterprise, on competing with Anthropic. What's left of that? Was that just a misfire and she had the wrong ideas? Is it still the plan? This seems like the question about OpenAI.
So, yeah, I think some of it has honestly fallen by the wayside, which we've seen for a bunch of stuff that OpenAI had tried in the past year or two. You know, when they vowed to stop doing all their side quests, which is ironically something that Simo herself wrote in an internal memo.
Yeah, it feels like several episodes ago you were on and we just talked about the series of code reds at OpenAI.
Right. And so, yeah, I mean, right now they're focused on the key revenue drivers, which are enterprise and coding. And that's really what they're all in on. You know, they've, they're also, of course, really focused on building a super app, which is supposed to incorporate all the stuff together and just making that super app better. But, besides that, I mean, you know, they're trying to cut the fat and just, you know, operate as a leaner business, which I think is helped by some of these executive salaries being cut. And yeah, they're trying to look better on their balance sheet when they IPO and there's a lot of pressure to do that, especially when SpaceX just IPO'd at a crazy valuation and Anthropic is apparently, you know, gunning to exceed that. We'll see if that actually happens.
When they changed Simo's title from, what was it, CEO of applications to AGI chief? I mean, this is the most Decoder thing of all. I looked at their org chart changing and I thought this isn't going to last. And over and over and over again they keep reassigning people and then as you say they leave and we see one person take over those roles and consolidate power. We'll come to the IPO in a second, but where is Sam Altman in all of this? It seems like he should be running OpenAI.
Yeah, I mean I think that he really likes focusing on the long-term stuff and I think that the events of the last couple of years and all of the lawsuits have shown him that maybe he isn't supposed to lead direct teams in a huge way. You know what I mean? Like he has a few direct reports, but should he really be involved in like, you know, the minutia of the day-to-day operations? Maybe not. He's said before and in blog posts that the company put out years ago, you know, they've, this is kind of on the trend that they've been following. Like I remember a year ago, two years ago, they would put out summer blog posts saying that different C-suite executives' roles would be changing slightly and Sam would be focusing a little bit on the longer term, on research. And this is just a continuation of that trend in my opinion. I mean as we know, and this is a big Decoder thing as well, you know, the more power you have at a company, the higher your title, the less you probably are involved in the actual day-to-day, especially at a tech company. And so I think that this is just another example of that. Sam has always been interested in kind of the research and long-term stuff. You know, Brockman is an engineer. He was described really early on at the company as an engineering workhorse that pushed to build scaled-up systems that would train the AI and make it work. So he's always been seen internally by employees as kind of a can-do person. He makes things happen and he has the engineering training that is required to kind of scale a system. So I mean, I could see investors being thrilled about this and I could also see Altman saying, "Okay, I know this guy's in my corner." You know, Altman already kind of cleaned out the board. He's surrounded by people that are going to support him and he trusts Brockman and he says, "Okay, yeah, I actually don't really want to be involved in the operational stuff quite as much. I want to be focused on the direction of the company, so you handle that. You're an extension of me kind of. I can trust you. Go ahead." That's kind of what I think is happening here.
You've talked to Brockman before. I've met him. He just did a video with our friend Joanna Stern. You can see he's pretty direct. He answers the questions. What kind of character do you think he's going to be as the person who's operationalizing OpenAI? Is this a get stuff done, you got to make the numbers go up or is this more expansive of an approach?
