OpenAI’s executive exodus has one big winner

Today on Decoder, I’m talking to Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field about some pure Decoder bait: the seemingly-endless org chart changes at OpenAI, and how all of them seem to consolidate power under cofounder Greg Brockman, the company’s president. While Sam Altman is the CEO and still OpenAI’s most public face, Brockman has amassed enormous power and influence within the top ranks of the company as other senior leaders have left in rapid succession these past few months. --- [Image: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24792604/The_Verge_Decoder_Tileart.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. --- Brockman now oversees the company’s entire consumer and enterprise product teams, including ChatGPT, Codex, and its major infrastructure build out. As Hayden recently reported, he is effectively now the day-to-day operational leader of OpenAI. This will have major effects on OpenAI as a company and its product strategy, at a time when it continues to cede ground to Anthropic in the enterprise and is preparing for a historic IPO. This is all against the backdrop of needing to turn a profit in the next few years and the company’s huge ambitions to replace both Google Search and the iPhone in the consumer market. So I wanted Hayden to break down for me what’s going on at OpenAI, and the increasingly important role Greg Brockman will play in its future. Okay: Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field on Greg Brockman’s consolidation of power at OpenAI. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Hayden Field, you’re The Verge’s senior AI reporter. Welcome back to Decoder. Thanks. It’s great to be here. Always, always chaos when you’re here, Hayden. Absolutely. There’s never a calm week. If there’s a calm week coming up, I know something even crazier is coming the next week. We should just rename the show The Real Housewives of AI. [Laughs] Honestly, that would be fitting. Straight up, that’s what we should do. A lot of personalities, a lot of feelings, a lot of relationships that people have really come to value over a long period of time. And a lot of lore. A lot of lore that goes between all these people for years and years and years. It’s crazy. And now they’re even putting out profiles on some of their spouses. The circles and the people themselves are really interesting. Today the drama is about OpenAI and specifically Greg Brockman, who seems to be consolidating even more power at OpenAI. You just wrote a long story about this. It seems very clear that Greg is emerging as the central decision maker at OpenAI. Describe what’s going on. Greg has obviously been pretty influential at OpenAI for a really long time, but what’s different now is that he has so much control over the day-to-day operations in a way he didn’t before. He was always a cofounder. He was always heavily involved. It was him, Ilya Sutskever, and Sam Altman for a long time, all in these email threads that came out during the Musk v. Altman trial. We saw them all talking about the future of OpenAI, what it should look like, and all their strange dynamics with Elon Musk. But Brockman was in a big-picture role before, and now he’s increasingly taking on so much power in the day-to-day. Altman has been focusing more on the big picture, the IPO stuff, and the direction of the company at large. Meanwhile, Brockman is amassing all this power day-to-day as other executives leave. He’s been in control now of Codex, of its enterprise business, the consumer side. There are four arms of the company right now and he’s in control of all of them. It’s been really interesting to see how that’s happened over the last few months. Greg is a character in the AI story. Certainly inside of OpenAI, he’s been a central figure in a lot of the company’s drama over time. So if you’ve been paying attention to the AI industry, you’re familiar with him. But if someone haven’t, explain who Greg is and why he’s such a notable figure both in AI and at OpenAI. He has been on my radar for seven years now. He’s been on other people’s for even longer. He dropped out of MIT to join Stripe way back in the day. He was Stripe’s CTO during its really early explosive growth phase. He left in 2015 to cofound OpenAI. That’s how he came on the AI radar. Ever since then, he’s been a really influential figure. He, Ilya Sutskever, and Sam Altman were all heavily involved in the drama with Elon Musk really early on, raising money, trying to lure people over to OpenAI, hire top talent, and figure out who was going to control AGI in the event they ever made it. There’s a lot going on there. In the years following, Mira Murati joined and Brockman, Sutskever, Murati, and Altman became the four main players here. These were the most talked-about people at OpenAI. You saw them in the headlines the most. They had the most power at the company. And then when the board coup happened in 2023, that’s when Brockman flew onto the scene in a new way. He had been behind the scenes a little bit, under the radar. He was not really doing that many public interviews. I interviewed him in 2020, but it’s not like he was a talking head. You weren’t seeing that much of him unless you were really watching the company and the industry. But when Sam Altman got fired by the board, Brockman was so incensed that he quit immediately. He and Altman were going to start their own thing, or were potentially going to lead a department at Microsoft. That’s when he was making waves in a new way because he was hellbent on the drama. Brockman said, “Okay, if Sam goes, I go.” That’s when he became Sam’s right hand in a new way. Before that, he was just one of the many execs. They were close, but the board coup made them closer than ever. That’s also what made Sam know that he could trust him in a new way and thereby later greenlight him getting more power. This was a big bet in the politics of the organization. Mira was going to become the new CEO for five minutes. Then there was going to be another new CEO and it was unclear who would stay and who would go. Justifiably, Altman did not know who he could trust in that moment, except Greg Brockman was ride or die. He said, “I’m leaving. I’m going.” The five minutes that they were going to start a new division of Microsoft were some of the most hilarious five minutes in tech history. But Brockman had basically made it clear he was ride or die for Sam. Over time, that bet has paid off. That move has paid off. Even during that board coup moment, it was not clear that Sam would ever come back. I remember I was backpacking in Patagonia at the time and I didn’t have a laptop, but I wrote six articles on my phone. It was a crazy time. It seemed like Brockman and Altman were going to be fine, but just be on their own. Of course, all the hundreds of employees signing a letter that they would leave if Sam was not reinstated is what got the ball rolling on him coming back and then pulling an UNO reverse on all the board members who had voted to oust him, except one. That was a big moment where he didn’t know who he could trust. Some of the people who he had trusted the most were the ones who voted for him to be fired. That went a long way with him that Brockman quit as well. Ever since then, we’ve seen Brockman positioned in the public eye a little bit more. He’s been in the press more. This summer is when he really amassed a lot more power after a couple other executives left, and he’s now in control of quite a lot of pillars of the company. What’s really striking is, yes, we can talk about 2023 and the board coup and Sam going and coming back and who was going to stay or go then, but actually this year has been more dramatic in terms of executive departures from OpenAI. Just since April, the list is staggering. I’m just going to run down it: Bill Peebles who ran Sora; Kevin Weil, who was head of product at Instagram and then VP of OpenAI’s science arm; Fidji Simo, who was supposed to be head of product and was at one point the AGI chief, left on health leave and then just never came back; Kate Rouch, the Chief Marketing Officer; Srinivas Narayanan, the CTO of B2B; Brad Lightcap, who was the former CEO and the head of special projects; and then just recently Denise Dresser, the Chief Revenue Officer, who is an important character if your company’s about to IPO. That is a lot of people, and it seems like Brockman just took all of their roles as all of those people left. Is that what’s happening here? More or less. Some of them definitely affected his position less than others. For some of them, like CMO Kate Rouch, leaving didn’t really give him that much more power. But what was interesting is Simo, the ex-chief of AI at the company, is the one whose absence left a huge gap for Brockman to fill. He took over a ton of different aspects. As you just alluded to, a lot of the people who had just left the company had also recently changed roles. Through one way or another, a lot of these people leaving created a power vacuum that Brockman could then capitalize on. It’s not like he had this master plan of amassing power, but either way, he ended up with a lot of power. What is interesting is when Brad Lightcap transitioned roles, for example, one of these other people took over his COO responsibilities. Guess who it was? Dresser. Then she leaves. Now some of those responsibilities fall to Brockman. It didn’t all happen cut and dry, but in one way or another, people switching roles and then leaving the company, he ended up with a ton more power. I can’t even calculate the ratio really of how much power he ended up with. Now he’s in control — to give you some context — of the entire product strategy of the company, which is obviously incredibly important when you’re about to IPO and you’re getting a lot of pressure to turn a profit. He’s in charge of the company’s entire scaling arm, as well as core product and platform; all of consumer, which includes health, commerce, personal finance, ChatGPT, and other consumer-facing stuff; and core infrastructure, ads, data science, and growth. What isn’t he in charge of, really? You know what I mean? I want to talk about Fidji Simo for one more second here. She was the former CEO of Instacart, but before that she was a really high-ranking executive at Meta. She ran the Facebook app. She was in charge of a lot of monetization. When she came to OpenAI, it felt like her role was to turn the consumer version of ChatGPT into a product. There were lots and lots of people leaving Meta to go to OpenAI for a while, such that basically we had reported that every all hands at Meta was about, “What are you going to do about OpenAI? They’re taking all of our people.” You just saw this exodus of people from Meta going to OpenAI in various ways, led by Fidji Simo, in a moment where it felt like what they wanted to do was take on Google as a big consumer product supported by ads. It’s funny, Altman actually copped to that ambition on the David Senra’s show last week — here he is, giving Peter Thiel credit for saying OpenAI should compete directly with Google: > Sam Altman: He’s like, ‘The power of this is the power of the Google text box, it’s a text box you can type anything into and it does the right thing. Clearly, the empty text box worked for Google so why don’t you just double down on that?’ That’s pretty straightforward and that’s what they did. Altman says they went super hard at it — being the empty text box, taking the Google business model, which is one of the best business models in internet history. That was a big bet, and they hired Fidji Simo to go run that bet. But she left, and that does not seem to be the emphasis anymore. The emphasis is on Codex, on enterprise, on [truncated for AI cost control]