Greg Brockman is an American software engineer, a co-founder of OpenAI, and its president. He studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, leaving MIT before completing his degree to join the early team at Stripe. Before OpenAI, he was chief technology officer of Stripe, helping build engineering culture and infrastructure as it scaled into a major financial technology firm, before leaving in 2015 to help found OpenAI alongside Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and others.
Building OpenAI
As president, Brockman has been closely involved in OpenAI's engineering culture and, unusually for an executive of his seniority, has continued to write production code personally throughout the company's growth, a trait he has described as central to his role and to keeping OpenAI's leadership close to its technical work. He has been publicly associated with major model releases including GPT-3, GPT-4, and ChatGPT, and with the scaling infrastructure work that supported OpenAI's rapid growth after the 2022 launch of ChatGPT.
The 2023 board crisis
When OpenAI's board removed Sam Altman as CEO in November 2023 during the OpenAI board crisis, Brockman was removed from the board the same day and resigned from the company shortly afterward in protest, publicly criticizing the process as having been handled without adequate communication to leadership. He was among the signatories of the employee letter demanding the board's resignation and Altman's reinstatement, and he returned to his roles as president and board member once the crisis was resolved days later and Altman was reinstated as CEO.
Later role
Brockman has continued to serve as OpenAI's president through the company's subsequent growth, including its expanding compute infrastructure partnerships, its consumer and enterprise product lines, and continued competition with rivals such as Anthropic and Google DeepMind. He is frequently described within OpenAI and by outside observers as one of the company's most stable and technically hands-on leaders, and, together with Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, is considered one of the figures most identified with OpenAI's founding mission and subsequent transformation into a leading commercial AI developer.