What it’s like to be a founder of the most high-stakes startup ever, OpenAI

Being a founder is difficult under any circumstances. You operate under a state of constant duress, scrambling to figure out a working business model while not getting crushed by incumbents, losing key talent, and striving to avoid failure. Mental and physical health can take a serious toll. It’s a journey full of extreme highs and lows.

Now imagine you’re not just a startup founder, but you are the founder of the leading company in the most transformative field in history: AI.

Greg Brockman, the cofounder and president of OpenAI, has been with Sam Altman for the startup’s entire history, including during Altman’s brief 2023 ousting as CEO, only taking a short sabbatical late last year.

In between, Brockman has had to navigate lawsuits, political and regulatory scrutiny, historic fundraises, and a public that is not convinced the future he’s building is a positive one.

I sat down with Brockman on Thursday for a one-on-one discussion to gain his perspective on everything from OpenAI’s recent Hugging Face security breach to how the U.S. should consider Chinese open-source AI models, to what the business model of an AI Lab really is, to how he deals with the pressure of running OpenAI.

As for the business model, “The fundamental value delivery that we are after—we’re not there yet,” Brockman said. “The massive value creation is yet to come.”

And as for the pressure? “I lean on my wife a lot,” he told Fortune.

And indeed, as I left OpenAI’s New York office in the SoHo Puck Building (where OpenAI is neighbors to one of its biggest backers, Thrive Capital) I bumped into Brockman’s wife, who had made the trip to New York City to support her husband.

The transcript below has been edited for length, clarity, and publication.

Earlier this week, OpenAI wrote a blog post detailing a situation where its LLM models broke out of a contained environment and interacted with a competitor, Hugging Face. What surprised you most about that incident, and how can a security breach like that be prevented in the future? Is more collaboration needed across competing AI companies?

Greg Brockman: When we start to think about moments like this, it is less about the specific incident and more about the general level of capability that the models have.

Our perspective has been that we really want to help defenders bring this technology to bear so people can use it to secure their systems. 

The fact that they weren’t able to use our model is something that really stood out to us. We need to do a better job of making these models more accessible, and to try to help educate people too, just so they understand why they need them. Cyber defense is a huge priority for us. That’s a team we’ve been really staffing up, and they’re starting to execute with significant focus and urgency. This moment is one that I hope can really bring together the industry because everyone’s interests are very aligned.

In the Hugging Face incident, it sounded like there were two models—one known model and one that hasn’t been previously disclosed. Is there anything else you can tell us about what model is to come and how you’re looking at that next model in light of what just happened?

I don’t want to add too much on top of our blog post because it’s still actively being investigated. But we said it’s a combination of models; we mentioned two of them, but we said it’s a combination of different models. It is less about any one model or any release; it is really just thinking about the overall picture.

There’s a different post that has gotten less attention, but in some ways is more complete. Earlier this week, we talked about a model where we did take it down. We implemented a number of different safeguards internally, and then were........

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