OpenAI's executive exodus has one big winner

Today, I’m talking with Hayden Field, The Verge’s senior AI reporter, 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. 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. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: It’s Greg Brockman’s OpenAI now | The Verge OpenAI’s Brockman brushes off concerns about leadership changes | CNBC Sam Altman on building OpenAI & betting on the impossible | David Senra OpenAI’s Q2 sales show tepid growth compared to Anthropic | WSJ Anthropic's revenue run rate reportedly surpasses $65 billion pre-IPO | Axios OpenAI President On Reinventing Computers | Johanna Stern / YouTube Greg Brockman takes control of OpenAI’s products in latest shake-up | Wired OpenAI’s president is a Trump mega-donor | The Verge Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:38Speaker 02

  Hello, welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Hayden Field, The Verge's senior AI reporter, about some pure Decoder bait, the seemingly endless org chart changes at OpenAI, and how all of them have seemed to consolidate power under co-founder Greg Brockman, the company's president. While Sam Altman is the CEO in 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. Brockman now oversees the company's entire consumer and enterprise product teams, including ChatGPT, Codex, and its major infrastructure build-out. As Hayden reported last week, Brockman is now effectively the day-to-day operational leader of OpenAI.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  This will obviously have major effects on both 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 an historic IPO, 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's senior AI reporter Hayden Field, and Greg Brockman's consolidation of power at OpenAI. Here we go. Hayden Field, you're The Verge's senior AI reporter. Welcome back to Decoder.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  Thanks, it's great to be here.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Always chaos when you're here, Hayden.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Absolutely. It's like, there's never a calm week. If there's a calm week coming up, like, I know something's even crazier is coming the next week.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  We should just rename the show The Real Housewives of AI.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Yep. Honestly, that would be fitting.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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, like, you know, they're even putting out profiles on, like, some of their spouses, like, yeah, the circles and the people themselves are really interesting.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  So today, the drama is around OpenAI, and specifically Greg Brockman, who seems to be consolidating ever more power at OpenAI. You just wrote a long story about this. It seems very clear that Greg is emerging as sort of the central decision-maker at OpenAI. Describe what's going on.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  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. You know, he was always a co-founder, he was always heavily involved, you know, it was like him, Ilya Sutskever, and Sam Altman for a long time, all like, you know, 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, all their strange dynamics with Elon Musk. But now, Brockman was in a big-picture role before. Now he's increasingly taking on so much power in the day-to-day. Altman has kind of, you know, been focusing more on big-picture IPO stuff, the direction of the company at large.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Brockman is, you know, amassing all this power day-to-day as other executives leave. You know, he's been in control now of Codex, enterprise stuff, consumer. He's just, pretty much, there's four arms of the company right now, and he's in control of all of them. So it's been really interesting to see how that's happened over the last few months.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  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 you haven't, explain who Greg is and why he's such a notable figure, both in AI and at OpenAI.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, he has been on my radar for seven years now. He's been on other people's for even longer. You know, he dropped out of MIT to join Stripe way back in the day. And then he was Stripe's CTO during its really early explosive growth phase. So he left in 2015 to co-found OpenAI. That's kind of how he came on the AI radar. Ever since then, you know, he's been a really influential figure. Him, Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman, they were all heavily involved in the drama with Elon Musk really early on, raising money, trying to lure people over, hire some top talent, figure out who was going to control AGI in the event they ever made it. Lots going on there.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  And then, yeah, in the years following, you know, Mira Maroti joined, and Brockman, Sutskever, Maroti, and Altman were kind of the four main players here. They were the most talked about, 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 kind of flew onto the scene in a new way. He had been kind of 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, you know, 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.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  And he and Altman were going to start their own thing, or eventually kind of lead a department at Microsoft. So that's when he was making waves in a new way, because he was, you know, hell-bent on the drama. He was like, okay, if Sam goes, I go. And that's kind of when he became Sam's right-hand, I would say, in a new way. Before that, you know, he was just one of the many execs. They were close, but the board coup, I think, made them closer than ever. And that's also what made Sam know that he could trust him in a new way, and thereby later kind of greenlight him getting more power, probably.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  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. I think, justifiably, Altman did not know who he could trust in that moment, except Greg Brockman was like ride or die. Like, I'm leaving, I'm going, we're gonna... 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. And over time, that bet has paid off, right? That move has paid off, even though during that board coup moment, it was not clear that Sam would ever come back.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  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. But, yeah, I mean, it seemed like Brockman and Altman were going to be fine, but just be on their own. And then, of course, all the hundreds of employees signing a letter that they would leave if Sam was not reinstated is kind of what got the ball rolling on him coming back, and then kind of pulling an Uno reverse on all the board members who had voted to out him, except one. And, yeah, I think that was a big moment, that he didn't know who he could trust. Some of the people who he had trusted the most were the ones who voted against him, you know, to be fired.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  So, you know, I think that went a long way with him, that Brockman quit as well. And, yeah, ever since then, we've seen Brockman kind of be positioned in the public eye a little bit more, he's, you know, been in the press more. And then, yeah, 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.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  And 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 Wile was the head of product at Instagram, he was the VP of OpenAI's science arm, Fiji Simo, who was supposed to be the head of product, was at one point the AGI chief, she 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 social projects, and then just recently, Denise Dresser, the chief revenue officer. Two is an important character if your company is about to IPO.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  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?

• 9:52Speaker 03

  More or less. I mean, some of them definitely affected his position less than others. You know, some of them, like, the CMO leaving, you know, didn't really give him that much more power, et cetera. But what was interesting is Simo, the ex AGI chief of the company.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Is the one who kind of her absence left a huge gap for Brockman to fill and he just took over a ton of different aspects. Also, as you just alluded to, you know, a lot of these people had recently, a lot of the people who had just left the company had also recently changed roles. So it's like essentially more or less through one way or another, a lot of these people leaving created a power vacuum that Brockman could then kind of capitalize on even, you know, it's not like he had this probably master plan of amassing power, but either way, somehow he ended up with a lot of power. And what I think is interesting is like, you know, when Brad Lightcap transitioned roles, for example, one of these other people

• 10:53Speaker 03

  took over his kind of COO responsibilities. Guess who it was? Dresser. Then she leaves. Okay. Now those responsibilities, some of them fall to Brockman. So it's like, 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 like, I can't even like calculate the ratio really of how much power he ended up with. But yeah, now he's in control. To give you some context of the entire product strategy of the company, which is like, obviously incredibly important when you're about to IPO and you're getting a lot of pressure to turn a profit. The whole, the company's entire scaling arm, core product and platform, all of consumer, which is like health, commerce, personal finance, and just, you know, chat GPT, consumer facing stuff.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  Core infrastructure, ads, data science and growth. So it's like, what isn't he in charge of really? You know what I mean?

• 11:47Speaker 02

  We need to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back.

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• 13:39Speaker 02

  We're back with Reg's Hayden Field discussing the major org chart changes at OpenAI. I want to talk about Fiji Simo for, 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 chat GPT into a product. And there were lots and lots of people leaving Meta to go to OpenAI for a while, such that basically we had reporting that every all hands at Meta was about, what are you going to do about OpenAI? Like they're taking all of our people. You just saw this exodus of people from Meta going to OpenAI in various ways, led by Fiji Simo, in a moment where it felt like what

• 14:23Speaker 02

  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 show last week. Here he is giving Peter Thiel credit for saying OpenAI should compete directly with Google.

• 14:36Speaker 06

  He's like, the power of this is the power of the Google text box. It's like a text box you can type anything into and it does the right thing. You know, clearly the empty text box worked for Google. So why don't you just double down on that?

• 14:47Speaker 02

  So that's pretty straightforward and that's what they did. Altman says they went super hard at it, being the empty text box, taking on Google's business model, which is one of the best business models in internet history. That was a big bet and it felt like they hired Fiji Simo to go run that bet. She left. That does not seem to be the emphasis anymore. The emphasis is on codec, on enterprise, on competing with Anthropic. What's left of that? Was that just a misfire and she had the wrong ideas? Is it still the plan? This seems like the question about OpenAI.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  So yeah, I think some of it has honestly fallen by the wayside, which we've seen for a bunch of stuff that OpenAI had tried in the past year or two, you know, when they vowed to stop doing all their side quests, which is ironically something that Simo herself wrote in an internal memo.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think like several episodes ago, you were on and we just talked about the series of code reds at OpenAI.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  Right. And so, yeah, I mean, right now they're focused on the key revenue drivers, which are enterprise and coding. And that's really what they're all in on, you know, they've, they're also of course really focused on building a super app, which is supposed to incorporate all this stuff together and just making that super app better. But besides that, I mean, you know, they're trying to cut, cut the fat and just, you know, operate as a lean, as a leaner business, which I think is helped by some of these executive salaries being cut. And yeah, they're trying to look better on their balance sheet when they IPO and there's a lot of pressure to do that, especially when SpaceX just IPO'd at a crazy valuation and Anthropic is apparently, you know, gunning to exceed that. We'll see

• 16:26Speaker 03

  if that actually happens.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  When they changed Simo's title from, what was it, CEO of Applications to AGI Chief? I mean, this is the most decoder thing of all. I looked at their org chart changing and I thought this isn't going to last. And over and over and over again, they keep reassigning people. And then, as you say, they leave and we see one person take over those roles and consolidate power. We'll come to the IPO in a second, but where is Sam Altman in all of this? It seems like he should be running OpenAI.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think that he really likes focusing on the long-term stuff. And I think that the events of the last couple of years and all of the lawsuits have shown him that maybe he isn't supposed to lead direct teams in a huge way. You know what I mean? Like he has a few direct reports, but should he really be involved in like, you know, the minutia of the day-to-day operations? Maybe not. He's said before and in blog posts that the company put out years ago, you know, they've, this is kind of on the trend that they've been following. Like, I remember a year ago, two years ago, they would put out summer blog posts saying that different C-suite executives' roles would be changing

• 17:38Speaker 03

  slightly and Sam would be focusing a little bit on the longer term, on research. And this is just a continuation of that trend, in my opinion. I mean, as we know, and this is a big decoder thing as well, you know, the more power you have at a company, the higher your title, the less you probably are involved in the actual day-to-day, especially at a tech company. And so I think that this is just another example of that. Sam has always been interested in kind of the research and the long-term stuff. You know, Brockman is an engineer. He was described really early on at the company as an engineering workhorse that pushed to build scaled up systems that would train the AI and make it work. So he's always been seen internally by employees as kind of a can-do person. He makes things

• 18:22Speaker 03

  happen and he has the engineering training that is required to kind of scale a system. So, I mean, I could see investors being thrilled about this and I could also see Altman saying, okay, I know this guy's in my corner. You know, Altman already kind of cleaned out the board. He's surrounded by people that are going to support him and he trusts Brockman. And he says, okay, yeah, I actually don't really want to be involved in the operational stuff quite as much. I want to be focused on the direction of the company. So you handle that. You're an extension of me, kind of. I can trust you. Go ahead. That's kind of what I think is happening here.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  You've talked to Brockman before. I've met him. He just did a video with our friend Joanna Stern. You can see, he's pretty direct. He's, he answers the questions. What kind of character do you think he's going to be as a person who's operationalizing OpenAI? Is it, is this a get stuff done? Do you have to make the numbers go up? Or is this more expansive of an approach?

• 19:14Speaker 03

  It's going to be interesting to see how he handles this much responsibility, especially this many disparate arms of the company. He's a really can-do person. He has a lot of engineering training. He's pretty respected within the company, but I do think there's going to be a lot of natural tension here because I mean, consumer, enterprise, health, personal finance, these really, really intense departments that handle data extremely differently. And then you've got all the core infrastructure stuff and the kind of the behind the scenes stuff that makes everything work. I think we're going to see a lot of natural tension arise, especially because this company has a limited amount of funds, even if it's a huge number, it's still limited in some way, especially now compared to a few years ago.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  And also they have a limited amount of compute and that's something that every executive at OpenAI has run into problems with, you know, allocating the compute, the research side of things says they don't get enough sometimes, or the product side says they need all of it. Like, it's going to be really interesting to see how he squares all this, especially as someone who's trying to kind of make everyone happy. Probably he's not going to be able to. And so he's going to have to make some hard decisions.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  This brings us, I think, to the IPO because the IPO is where those hard decisions have to pay off. There's been a lot of talk about OpenAI playing catch-up to Anthropic, particularly in the enterprise and with coding. There's a Wall Street Journal story last week that said OpenAI's revenue in Q2 lagged behind Anthropic's. Obviously Anthropic will tell you they're profitable, even though we haven't actually seen their numbers, how they calculate it. You've mentioned the IPO several times now. SpaceX just went public. Big IPOs are all the rage. What role is the IPO playing in all these changes? Is it focusing the company down? Is it making that equity pay off? Is it needing to raise more capital? What's the shape of it?

• 20:58Speaker 03

  It's absolutely behind a ton of these changes. It is normal to see a lot of changes in the C suite ahead of an IPO. But some of the sources I spoke to within the industry who kind of study the way these IPOs typically happen in tech said that the interesting and unusual thing here is how many C suite execs left in such a short timeframe because they know that looks bad at the company. You know, it's one thing if you need to cut salaries, make the balance sheet look a little bit different, make the company leaner. That's normal and it is an easy way to do that, to not replace, you know, someone that's making, we can only speculate how much each of these people's salaries was.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  But yeah, I mean, this is an easy way, cut and dry to, you know, help out the balance sheet. But doing all of this in this amount of time, it kind of reminds me of what we were talking about last time about Google and DeepMind and how maybe, you know, one person didn't leave when Jeff Dean did because they didn't want to make the company look bad. Now, OpenAI, you know, people are leaving left and right, sometimes within 24 hours, 48 hours. And Brad Lightcap, you know, he just got a new job, special projects head. And then, you know, a couple of months later, he's out, even after being at the company for so many years. I mean, part of it's probably just cashing out. You know, you can make a lot of money if you're an exec, the company is about to IPO and

• 22:26Speaker 03

  you have a lot of stock options. But it is unusual, sources said, that it's happening in this short amount of time. Plus, I mean, as we've said, it's just not really super efficient for one person to be in charge of so much. But, you know, whatever, we'll see how he does.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  The IPO is interesting for a number of reasons, but to me, the most clarifying is that they're up against Anthropic. And there are numbers coming out, reported numbers about Anthropic's finances that make that company look pretty good. And the company hasn't really challenged them in public. So we have to assume that they they're happy that there's reporting out there that the numbers look good for them. But all of that is enterprise, right? They're selling Claude to big enterprises, to the government. It's effective. Maybe their token prices have high margins. It's unclear what the internals of Anthropic's business look like, but the numbers that we can get look pretty good and they support a big IPO. And there's just a lot of excitement around Anthropic for that reason. That's Anthropic is an enterprise software provider. That's their business.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  It's a thing they're focused on. It's all they do. OpenAI has taken a lot of shots. You're talking about cost cutting and have an IPO. Are they shutting down? Are they closing the aperture on all the things they're trying to do to compete with Anthropic ahead of this IPO?

• 23:41Speaker 03

  It's interesting because I've seen a slight shift from OpenAI. You know, earlier in the summer, last spring, they were saying, okay, enterprise and coding, that's what we got to focus on. We got to make money. We got to compete with Anthropic. Now, though, ahead of the IPO, I think they're getting a little bit of different advice. Yes, they need to focus on those things because obviously that's where the money is. But now they're also being told, hey, you also have to differentiate yourself from Anthropic. You can't just be a copy that's lagging behind. You have to be doing something different. And so they are going to, you know, really lean into consumer and hardware as well. You know, one attorney told me that for OpenAI to be successful, you know, in the public

• 24:26Speaker 03

  eye and in investors' eyes, they need hardware and consumer products to sell to consumers. And luckily, that's something that Brockman has experience with. But yeah, I mean, it's hard to do everything, but I think they've had to narrow a ton and then slightly widen again. They're saying we're like the Kleenex of AI right now because of how we're known in the consumer world. So, you know, people say, oh, I'm an ass chat. Oh, I chat GPT it. And they're talking about just using AI in general. Maybe they weren't actually using chat GPT, but that's the way they're referring to things a lot of the time. So OpenAI knows they need to capitalize on that. That's one way they can be different from Anthropic. Of course, Anthropic also offers that, but they're much more known for enterprise and that is why they're making so much money. But yeah, OpenAI, you know, they're leaning into hardware.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  They have Johnny Ive. They've got to kind of not cut some of this stuff entirely because then they're going to look like Mark Zuckerberg with Meta. You know, they can't go all in on something and then just completely cut it, or they're probably worried about being a laughing stock. So you got to really, you know, cut the true fat, which they did with a lot of their side projects. But as far as consumer, hardware, enterprise and coding, those are their main bets right now. And I think we're going to see them really double down on that heading into the IPO.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Come on, Hayden. Aren't we actually in the metaverse right now? Like technically you and I are in the metaverse together right this second. It worked.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Absolutely, you know?

• 25:49Speaker 02

  It happened.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Should have made an avatar.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  I mean, technically, we're, you know, we're here in our bodies on the internet.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  Yep, that's true.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  What argument can you have except that the metaverse definitely worked and Mark Zuckerberg was super right about all of it? The consumer business is really hard. The scale of the play you need to make the consumer business work is on the order of fully overtake Google, which seems very challenging. And then in hardware, replace the iPhone. If you do anything other than replace the iPhone, people still have their iPhones. And then you're going to lose to Instagram every single time. Do they, have they said anything about how they plan to do either one of these things? Because replace Google with a Google level monetization engine seems very hard. Replace the iPhone, even if you have Johnny Ive, replace the iPhone such that people

• 26:43Speaker 02

  don't still have their iPhones, seems very hard. And neither one of these things has been in any kind of focus for me at least.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Like we talked about last time, I really am skeptical. I mean, hardware is hard. I've seen way too many companies crash and burn when they try to make an AI hardware device. And, you know, I think it's going to look beautiful because Johnny Ive is in charge. But as for how useful it's really going to be, especially in the era of AI populism, when there's a huge backlash against using AI, I don't know how excited people are going to be on a broad scale to like have something visible pinned to them or in their ears or on their table where you can tell they are using AI. I think it's going to be really exciting for a subset of people, but for the broader

• 27:33Speaker 03

  public, you know, I mean, Meta glasses are still, still uncool, still being called pervert glasses. So, you know, AI hardware, you've got a steep hill to climb.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  We have to take another short break. We'll be back in just a minute.

• 28:03Speaker 04

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• 28:32Speaker 05

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• 29:37Speaker 02

  We're back with Hayden Field, The Verge's senior AI reporter, talking about how OpenAI's path to an IPO is playing a role in Greg Brockman's consolidation of power.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Let's talk about what happens next with OpenAI, because those are the challenges. And what you have now is a new leader who is, as you said, running most of the company. Greg Brockman was just on CNBC last week. He basically defended the turnover. He said this.

• 30:01Speaker 08

  That there have been different eras where we have different sets of leaders in place. You know, I'm a constant, Sam is a constant, and that I think that we are stronger because of that resilience and diversity.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  So this might be just what Greg Brockman has to say, right? All these people are gone, but I'm still here, Sam's still here, the company's still the same. Do you think it's that? It's just the thing that he has to say? Or do you think there's something more real about OpenAI as a company? Where you have these two leaders who are clearly ride or die for each other, and you can swap in and out all these other executives, and the company will still have its own unique vision?

• 30:34Speaker 03

  I think he would like us to think the latter, but I think it's more of the former. I mean, it's never good when you have a bunch of people leaving at once. It's never good when you're constantly restructuring or reorganizing the company. It's bad all the way down. I mean, it's, you know, employees are probably feeling kind of weird. They have a new person in charge, they're being shuffled between different teams, their teams are headed by one person, and then their boss's boss is someone else, which probably means their bosses are weird. It's just, it's not great for productivity, especially heading into such an important time for OpenAI. Even if it's a move that makes sense and is good long term, it's still going to be weird for people in the short term.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  And, I mean, in some ways, the latter is true in terms of, you know, Brockman and Altman have been at the helm from the start. So it's not like, you know, someone that's been there for eight months that leaves is going to have as much of an impact. But we're seeing some people that have been there for a really long time leave as well, like Brad Lightcap, you know? He was someone that I had tracked for years and years. All of a sudden, he's out after switching roles, and now he says he's going to start something new. And he says he's implying he's still going to work with OpenAI in some way, shape, or form. He and Altman had a, you know, really friendly exchange after he left on X, but, you know, it's a lot of its for show.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  They've got to, you know, make sure that people aren't skittish about the company right now. So, yeah, I think it's something he just has to say. But it's also true that, you know, if there were two people that, you know, would be the most influential if they left, and luckily, those two are still there, Brockman and Altman.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  You've mentioned the public antipathy towards AI several times now. There is just a lot of anti-AI sentiment out in the world. And it's pretty politically coded, although it scrambled some political lines. Hitting AI is pretty bipartisan. Hitting data centers is pretty bipartisan. We've got a lot of reporting about that on the site. Brockman is into politics. Like, he donated 25 million to MAGA Inc. He's one of the top donors to Trump overall. Do you think him being so openly political will help or hurt him as he becomes more of a character, or more of a leader, more of a visible leader of OpenAI?

• 32:52Speaker 03

  I think it's going to help the company from the outside, just because, you know, they're trying to push a lot of stuff through, probably during the Trump administration. And they, you know, really want a voluntary regulation framework. They want to be in Trump's ear in a good way. I think it's going to hurt him internally, because, you know, we've seen at Google and at other tech companies, and a lot of employees at tech companies that I've interviewed in the past year, no matter what company they work at, they're incredibly angry if their CEO or their C-suite isn't doing enough to speak out against some of the Trump administration's decisions. Now, Brockman isn't just not speaking out against them, he's supporting them with tens of millions of dollars. So, you know, I could see this really hurting him from the inside.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  Maybe some people don't take him seriously, maybe we see some departures. I think it's going to help the company from the outside, just because, you know, when you're, you know, giving a lot of money to Trump, he seems to, you know, let you curry favor. So, we'll see.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  And to be clear, we've seen Sam Altman stand next to Trump and announce data center projects. So whatever reputation OpenAI was going to have because of its leaders, it might already have.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  But the specific political giving seems new. And as we head towards the midterms, it seems like a new kind of challenge for the leaders of the company to be openly associated with. Do you think it'll change any of the valence around data centers and AI, how the public feels about them?

• 34:16Speaker 03

  I don't know that it'll change that, because we've been kind of careening towards this for a while. You know, people are really mad about data centers, and it's a bipartisan feeling, like you mentioned, and same with AI. I mean, you know, Sam Altman and other AI CEOs have said in the past month that they feel like AI has a big PR problem, and that they haven't done a good job of showing people the good parts of AI, and how, you know, they need to do better to show people why they're even building it in the first place. And yeah, maybe you do, but, you know, people have been told a lot of the good things about it, and they're still not thinking that they're as good as the bad is bad. So I think they're in for a rude awakening there.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  But yeah, as for what you mentioned about Altman, yes, he and every other AI CEO have been at Trump's dining table, they've been, you know, caught on hot mics praising him. So it's not something hugely new that Brockman's giving this money, but what is new is that he's giving it so much of it in a personal capacity, so much so that Altman even had to come out and say at some point, oh, you know, Brockman only did this in a personal capacity, you know? We're not saying that we're super behind him. He also couldn't really say they weren't behind him, but they had to separate themselves a little. So that's what's interesting to me about this. It's like, the personal capacity of his giving has made so many headlines, and OpenAI kind of tried to distance itself a little bit, but not too much. And now, you know, they're not going to be able to do that, because he's essentially

• 35:45Speaker 03

  running day-to-day operations.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  I'm very curious to see how that plays out. I don't think we quite know yet, but as he becomes a more visible leader of the company, being that open about his politics, even in the context of the other big tech CEOs, is different. But we don't quite see that from all of them. We see it from Elon, but everyone else kind of plays it pretty safe. And this is new, especially for a leader at OpenAI. All right, let's end here. Let's say it's two years from now, OpenAI is public. Do we think Greg Brockman is the CEO, and Sam is just the chairman of raising money, or whatever it is that he's doing?

• 36:20Speaker 03

  I could see that happening. I mean, it would take a couple of big things to make that happen. Altman really likes being in charge, so I don't think he's going to be like, you know, going super quietly. But, you know, if he ever needs to move on to a more big-picture chairman role, if he, you know, if the IPO doesn't go so well, or, you know, he gets dragged in the public eye or something, and still needs to be part of the company but not the CEO, yeah, I could definitely see that happening, especially because Brockman, he has a lot of ambitions. We saw his journal entries come out during Discovery, during Musk v. Altman, and, you know, he was writing some pretty ambitious things. He's like financially.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Well, it'll get me to a billion dollars, right?

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it'll take me to one billion. He's saying, oh, this is my one chance to be in charge. There's a lot of entries that he's writing about how he's put his blood, sweat, and tears into the company, and how, you know, he needs to, you know, be in charge in some way, shape, or form. So I think that, you know, he will be gunning probably for a role like that, and he'd be happy to take it on. And, you know, we'll see what happens in the next few years, but I definitely don't think that's out of the question, especially because, yeah, I mean, he's been there since the beginning, he has a lot of product experience, and he's clearly ambitious. The other thing, though, that I think is interesting is, way back in the day, he wasn't always so aligned with Altman all the time. In fact, like Brockman and Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientists, were pretty aligned themselves against Sam every once in a while.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  Not against him, but they were questioning him, pushing back. They were saying things like, hey, like, it seems like you really care about this CEO role. It seems like you really care about being in charge and having a lot of power in this way, in this way. How does this relate to your political ambitions? You know, how does this relate to who's going to control AGI? We really don't want it to be a dictatorship. So I think Altman would be hard-pressed, probably, to give up the CEO title when he fought so hard for it, even, you know, 10 years ago, 11 years ago. But also, you know, if he ever does, seems like Brockman would be happy to take it on.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  I will end by stating my prediction that I've been making almost the whole year now. I don't think we end 2026 with OpenAI as the same kind of company as when the year started. And actually, I would say, given all of this turnover, that prediction has already come true. Right? Structurally, it is a very different company with very different goals than the year started. But I'll just put that prediction to you. You cover the company way more closely than I do. Do you think there's any way that OpenAI looks the same at the end of the year as it did at the top of the year?

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Absolutely not. I mean, when a company goes public, so many things change. And, you know, when it's even, especially like six months in, well, I mean, you know, I guess the end of the year is only, what, five months away?

• 39:05Speaker 02

  It's a scary number of months away.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  So it's tomorrow.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Let's say, you know, maybe not by like December 31st, but like six months from now, 100% it's going to look different, and probably sooner than that. Because, I mean, they're going to have to make a lot of changes, they're going to be listening to their investors in a new way, and they're going to be beholden to them in a new way.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  You know, there's only certain parts of this industry that make money. And, you know, they're not in the lead in some of those parts. So they're going to have to go all in on that type of stuff, the type of research that they want to do to stay at the frontier. They can make a case for that. Money-wise, they can say, look, in order to stay in the lead, we have to do this long-term stuff a little bit. But they're not going to be able to go all in on it all the time, because it costs a lot of money and compute, and they have a limited amount. So I think, like, we're going to see a lot of the anxieties that we saw Brockman and Altman voice a year ago, two years ago. You know, I've been in the room with them, talking, where they're talking about their fear about their running out of compute, how are they going to scale? And their whole job for the next six months, year, et cetera, is scaling.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  And so they've had so many concerns about this, they've had so many fears about how they're going to do this with their limited compute, especially now that they're IPO-ing and they're beholden to investors in a new way. I mean, there's no way they're going to look the same.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Hayden, this has been great. Thank you so much for being on Decoder again. We'll have you back when another season of The Real Housewives of AI kicks off, which is probably going to be tomorrow, the way we're going.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Thanks.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  I'd like to thank Hayden for taking the time to join me on Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really, anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected], we really do read all the emails, or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. If you're also on YouTube, you can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. It's the same handle on TikTok and Instagram, they're a lot of fun. If you'd like to go there, please share it with your friends and subscribe every day to podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Show is produced by Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Stat. This episode was edited by Ursula Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane, and the Decoder music is right break master cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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