Greg Brockman on AI as a tool

About Greg Brockman

Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, has been publicly discussing the company’s strategy around compute infrastructure, model releases, and the path to artificial general intelligence (AGI). In several interviews, he stated that OpenAI’s business model is to “buy, rent, build compute, and we resell it at a margin,” and argued that demand for intelligence is “unlimited.” He described the company’s $600 billion investment in data centers as an advantage for both business and the mission of bringing AI to everyone, and predicted that “we’re going to have data centers everywhere.” Brockman also discussed the new GPT-5.5 model, code-named “Spud,” calling it “a new class of intelligence” that has crossed a threshold of usefulness for general applications, particularly in programming and agentic work. He acknowledged that open-source models can distill from frontier models but argued that OpenAI’s advantage lies in end-to-end system co-design and long-standing investments in safeguards and mitigations. Brockman also reflected on the November 2023 board decision to fire CEO Sam Altman, describing it as a moment where he felt he “didn’t want to do it anymore.” He said he quit the same day after receiving a call from the board, and that he and Altman were joined by several close collaborators. He noted that the company did not lose a single employee to competing offers during that weekend. On the topic of AGI, Brockman estimated that OpenAI is “70-80% there,” and said that human attention will become the “single most important bottleneck” as AI makes the “doing of things” easier. He emphasized the importance of making compute widely available to avoid exacerbating inequality, and said that OpenAI’s goal is to ensure that AGI “benefits all of humanity.”

Profile compiled from Greg Brockman's verified public interviews and appearances. See all quotes & transcripts →