Greg Brockman
Co-founder and President of OpenAI
OpenAI co-founder and president — the lab’s tireless “builder-in-chief,” who has spent a decade demoing GPT models, championing scale, and arguing that making AGI go well is the most important problem there is.
In his words
AGI is the most extreme kind of technology that humans will ever create, with extreme upside and downside.
Making AGI go well is the most important problem I can imagine contributing towards.
Biography
Greg Brockman (born 1987 in North Dakota) dropped out of Harvard and then MIT to join Stripe, where he became the payments startup’s first CTO. In December 2015 he co-founded OpenAI alongside Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and others, serving first as CTO and chairman and, since 2022, as president.
The evangelist who codes
Brockman has been the scaling hypothesis’s most visible practitioner: he wrote in 2019 that AGI would be “the most extreme kind of technology that humans will ever create,” live-demoed GPT-4 on launch day in March 2023, and became famous for round-the-clock coding sessions. When OpenAI’s board fired Altman in November 2023, Brockman resigned in solidarity within hours; both returned five days later after an employee revolt. He has since said reasoning models give OpenAI a “line of sight” to AGI and puts progress toward his own definition at 70–80 percent.
By 2025 Fortune dubbed him OpenAI’s “builder-in-chief,” the executive turning the company’s trillion-dollar data-center ambitions into steel and silicon. Critics see in Brockman the purest form of the accelerationist bet — a man who acknowledges AGI’s “extreme downside” in writing while working relentlessly to build it faster — and note that OpenAI’s safety researchers have repeatedly departed while its compute buildout only grows.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/greg-brockman