Greg Brockman: Inside the 72 Hours That Almost Killed OpenAI
Blog: Farnam Street
The AI race, the future of AGI, and the inside story of OpenAI.
Greg Brockman is the co-founder and President of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and GPT-5. He was the first engineer at Stripe before leaving in 2015 to help start OpenAI.
In this rare conversation, Greg goes inside the moments that built, and nearly broke, the most important AI company in the world.
Featured clips
Breakthrough Moments at OpenAI
Sam Altman's Firing
Is AI Going Parabolic?
Why ChatGPT No Longer Shows Reasoning
AI and Job Loss
Available Now: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Transcript
Greg explains how the original Napa offsite produced the three-step technical plan OpenAI has followed for a decade and the real reason OpenAI had to abandon its pure nonprofit structure. He then walks through the 72 hours after Sam Altman was fired: where he was when he got the board call, why he quit the same day, how the “Phoenix” backup company was designed at Sam’s house the next morning, and the moment Ilya Sutskever’s tweet changed everything.
From there, the conversation turns forward: whether we’re in a global AI race, how much of OpenAI’s own code is now written by AI (“it’s hard to know what percent is not“), why OpenAI stopped showing reasoning traces, what a compute-constrained world means for who gets access to AGI, and Greg’s answer to the question everyone is really asking: What happens to your job?
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