It’s Greg Brockman’s OpenAI now

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.