In addition to Dresser and Lightcap, Fidji Simo, who had been OpenAI's product and business chief, announced last month she was stepping down from her role at the company to focus on recovery after a "severe exacerbation of a chronic illness." Brockman officially took over her responsibilities, which means he oversees the company's most important and profitable projects.
During a meeting with investors on Friday, Brockman thanked Dresser for her contributions and for building out the company's enterprise foundation, as CNBC previously reported. He also expressed excitement about Dresser's successor.
"There have been different eras where we have different sets of, of leaders in place," Brockman said Monday. "I'm a constant, Sam [Altman] is a constant, and that, I think that we are stronger because of that resilience and diversity."
Brockman co-founded OpenAI alongside Altman and a handful of other researchers and executives in 2015. The company rocketed into the mainstream following the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, and it's now working to justify its $852 billion valuation to investors as it gears up for what is expected to be a blockbuster initial public offering.
OpenAI confidentially filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, but the company has not officially disclosed when it plans to debut.
Brockman and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told investors on Friday that OpenAI's run rate increased 20% month over month in July, and business customers "grew even faster," up 32%, as CNBC reported. Brockman confirmed those figures on Monday.
In July, OpenAI disclosed that its AI models were behind what it described as an "unprecedented cyber incident" that rattled researchers and executives across the industry. The models escaped an isolated testing environment that had very limited internet access, chained together a series of vulnerabilities to reach the open web and eventually gained access to Hugging Face, which operates an open-source developer platform.
Brockman said Monday that OpenAI is taking the incident "extremely seriously," and he published a blog post to try and help organizations understand what steps they can take to defend themselves.
"We need to point out what we see coming, and sometimes that's positive, and sometimes that's mitigation of risks," Brockman told CNBC. "In this case, we saw something in how the system was interacting with the world that surprised us, but that we also felt was very important information to provide to others."
