GoKawiilis The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
OpenAI 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 OpenAI’s president and co-founder. He’s helped lead OpenAI 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 OpenAI 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 OpenAI 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 OpenAI’s science arm; and Srinivas Narayanan, CTO of B2B applications. Two others separately departed citing medical reasons: CMO Kate Rouch and Fidji Simo, OpenAI’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 OpenAI’s longtime COO — announced he would leave to start “something new.”
OpenAI 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 OpenAI’s super app efforts.
That role took on even greater significance the following month, after OpenAI 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 OpenAI 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.”
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