Textbook of AI

1987–, Engineer; co-founder of OpenAI

Gregory Brockman is an American engineer who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and served as its Chief Technology Officer and later President. Before OpenAI, he was Chief Technology Officer of Stripe, which he joined as employee #4 in 2010 and helped scale through the 2010s.

At OpenAI, Brockman led the engineering of OpenAI's training and inference infrastructure across the GPT line. He was a major contributor to GPT-3 (2020), DALL-E (2021), Codex (2021), ChatGPT (November 2022), GPT-4 (2023) and the products that brought large language models to a mass audience. His name appears as a co-author on the GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-4 and Codex technical reports, and on the InstructGPT paper.

Brockman left OpenAI temporarily in solidarity with Sam Altman during the November 2023 OpenAI board crisis. Microsoft offered to hire the entire OpenAI team during the five-day standoff; Brockman was central to that countermove. He returned to OpenAI when Altman was reinstated. In May 2024 he announced an extended sabbatical; he returned later in 2024.

Brockman dropped out of MIT and then Harvard before starting his career in industry. He has been an unusually visible engineering leader in an industry where the founders are typically researchers, and his focus on reliability and shipping at scale shaped OpenAI's product organisation.