
Written by a model from the transcript; not yet reviewed.
Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, sits down with Pat Grady to discuss where AI is heading across the full stack—from compute to the application layer. Brockman describes OpenAI's business as simply buying, renting, and building compute and reselling it at a margin, noting that demand for intelligence is unlimited and they never have enough compute. He argues that scaling laws are a deep, fundamental truth with no wall in sight, and that OpenAI is about 80% of the way to AGI, with models already more capable than humans at writing software.
Brockman shares a concrete example of a systems engineer who handed a design document to GPT-5.3 before bed and woke up to find the model had implemented the spec, added instrumentation, profiled the code, and iterated to an optimized result. He identifies human attention as the new bottleneck: the doing of things is easy, but deciding whether something is good, aligned, and worth approving is becoming the scarcest resource. He also discusses how OpenAI is structuring internal adoption of Codex with human accountability for merged code, and how the company is making painful focus decisions to build a single AGI product people can talk to for goals, health, and career advice.
The episode is worth listening to for its unfiltered view from inside OpenAI on what's actually happening with model capabilities, the practical advice for founders building on top of these tools, and the specific examples of where AI is already producing results that would have been impossible a year ago.
Compute as the Entire Businessinsight
Brockman describes OpenAI's business as simply buying, renting, and building compute and reselling it at a margin, with unlimited demand for intelligence driving the scaling.
Buy All Available Computestory
Brockman recalls telling his team to buy all available compute when ChatGPT launched, and that has been true ever since—they can never keep up with demand.
Engineer Wakes Up to Finished Codestory
A systems engineer handed a design document to GPT-5.3 before bed and woke up to find the model had implemented the spec, added instrumentation, profiled the code, and iterated to an optimized result.
Chronicle: AI That Remembers Your Daystrategy
Brockman announces Chronicle, a new tool that plugs into Codex and can see everything you're doing on your computer, forming memories so it instantly knows what you're talking about.
Codex Escalates to the Managerstory
Brockman asked Codex to install a package, hit an error, and told it to ping the author on Slack. Two minutes later, Codex had escalated to the author's manager.
Human Attention Is the New Bottleneckinsight
Brockman argues that human attention is becoming the single most important bottleneck: the doing of things is easy, but deciding whether something is good and aligned is not.
CEO of One Hundred Thousand Agentsinsight
Brockman envisions the future of work as being a CEO of an organization of 100,000 agents, with the mechanics feeling as different as going from quill to text message.
AI Produces Impossible Physics Formuladata
Brockman describes a physics result where OpenAI's AI produced a formula that physicists who'd worked on the problem for years thought was impossible, representing a step toward quantum gravity.
Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, joins Sequoia partner Alfred Lin at AI Ascent 2026 for a conversation that spans the full OpenAI stack. He explains why the company will never have enough compute, why he believes we're 80% of the way to AGI, and why the agentic coding tools that wrote 20% of your code last December are now writing 80% of it. Also: why human attention is becoming the scarcest resource in AI-augmented work, and what it might be like to one day run an organization of 100,000 agents.
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