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Greg Brockman

Co-founder and President of OpenAI

Greg Brockman is an American entrepreneur and software engineer who co-founded OpenAI and now serves as its president.1 Known for his relentless work ethic—often coding 80-hour weeks—he has helped unveil breakthrough products such as GPT-4 and steers the organization's mission to build safe, broadly beneficial artificial intelligence.2 Before OpenAI, Brockman was the fourth employee and later first CTO at Stripe, where he scaled the fintech from a dorm-room idea into a multibillion-dollar platform.3

  Early Life and Academic Foundations

Brockman grew up in Thompson, North Dakota, where he excelled in science competitions, earning a silver medal at the 2006 International Chemistry Olympiad.1 He briefly attended Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before leaving to pursue startup opportunities, reflecting a preference for rapid, hands-on learning.1

  Scaling Stripe's Engineering and Culture

In 2010 he joined Patrick and John Collison at Stripe as its fourth employee, rewriting much of the early codebase and helping build a culture that prized rigorous engineering standards.3 Promoted to CTO in 2013, he guided the company from fewer than ten people to more than 200, overseeing global payment infrastructure that now moves billions of dollars each year.3

  Driving Breakneck AI Product Rollouts

Brockman left Stripe in 2015 to co-found OpenAI with Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, coding the early stack from his apartment.1 He is renowned for live demos that unveil products like ChatGPT, DALL·E, and GPT-4 to the world the moment they are ready.24

Brockman pushes a "ship-then-iterate" culture inside OpenAI, arguing that wide usage surfaces issues and opportunities faster than closed-door research. His product-led approach has helped turn a once-small lab into a multibillion-dollar API business embraced by millions of developers.

  References

  1. Greg Brockman — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Brockman ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Will Henshall, "Greg Brockman," TIME100 AI, Sept 7 2023. https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman/ ↩ ↩2

  3. Biz Carson, "Stripe's CTO Greg Brockman Is Leaving the Company," Business Insider, May 6 2015. https://www.businessinsider.com/stripes-cto-greg-brockman-is-leaving-the-company-2015-5 ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Kyle Wiggers, "Interview with OpenAI's Greg Brockman: GPT-4 Isn't Perfect, but Neither Are You," TechCrunch, Mar 15 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/15/interview-with-openais-greg-brockman-gpt-4-isnt-perfect-but-neither-are-you/ ↩