Greg Brockman

Greg Brockman is an American software engineer and technology executive, born November 29, 1987 in Thompson, North Dakota. He is the co-founder and President of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT and the GPT model family, and was previously the first Chief Technology Officer of Stripe, which he joined in 2010 as the fourth employee. As of May 2026, he is the longest-tenured technical leader at OpenAI and the senior engineering and product face for the company across the GPT, ChatGPT, and GPT-5 release cycles.

At a glance

• Education: Attended Harvard University (2008 to 2009) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2009 to 2010); did not complete either degree.
• Current role: President and co-founder of OpenAI, since 2015. Took a sabbatical from August to November 2024 and returned to the role.
• Key contributions: Fourth employee and first Chief Technology Officer of Stripe (2010 to 2015); co-founder of OpenAI (December 2015), initially as Chief Technology Officer; engineering and product leadership for OpenAI Gym, OpenAI Five, the GPT family, ChatGPT, and GPT-4.
• X / Twitter: @gdb
• GitHub: @gdb
• Personal site: gregbrockman.com
• Blog: blog.gregbrockman.com
• Wikipedia: Greg Brockman

Origins

Brockman was born on November 29, 1987 in Thompson, North Dakota, a small town in the eastern part of the state, and grew up there before attending Red River High School in nearby Grand Forks. He has described an early interest in mathematics, chemistry, and computer science. As a high-school student he competed in the International Chemistry Olympiad, winning a silver medal in 2006, and was named a finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search.

He enrolled at Harvard University in 2008, intending to study mathematics, and left after one year. In 2009 he transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then dropped out the following year without completing the degree. He has cited a desire to work on production engineering at scale rather than continue with formal coursework.

Career

In 2010, after leaving MIT, Brockman joined the early-stage payments startup Stripe as the fourth employee, working alongside the company's co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison. In 2013 he was named the first Chief Technology Officer of the company, a role he held through Stripe's growth from an early-stage startup into one of the central payments infrastructure providers in Silicon Valley. During the five-year tenure he helped lead the engineering organization through the build-out of the API platform, fraud-detection systems, and developer-focused tooling that became identified with the company's product reputation. He departed Stripe in May 2015.

In December 2015 Brockman joined the founding cohort of OpenAI as one of eleven publicly named co-founders alongside Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Andrej Karpathy, Wojciech Zaremba, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Durk Kingma, and Pamela Vagata. His initial title was Chief Technology Officer, and he served on the OpenAI nonprofit board. He led the engineering organization through the early reinforcement-learning era, including the OpenAI Gym toolkit released in April 2016 and the OpenAI Five Dota 2 system. In 2018 he transitioned from the CTO role to President of the company. In November 2019 he and his wife Anna were married at the OpenAI offices in San Francisco, with Ilya Sutskever officiating.

Through the GPT-3 release in June 2020, the ChatGPT launch in November 2022, and the GPT-4 release in March 2023, Brockman remained the senior engineering and product face for OpenAI's flagship work. On March 14, 2023 he conducted the public live-stream demonstration that introduced GPT-4 to developers and the press.

On November 17, 2023, the OpenAI nonprofit board removed Sam Altman as Chief Executive Officer. Brockman announced his resignation in solidarity with Altman the same day, posting on X that he was "quitting based on today's news." On November 19, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella announced that Brockman and Altman would lead a new advanced AI research team at Microsoft. The arrangement did not take effect: by November 21, 2023, after a deal was reached to reinstate Altman as Chief Executive Officer and reconstitute the board, Brockman returned to OpenAI as President. He has remained in the role continuously since, with one notable exception: from August to November 2024 he took a sabbatical of approximately three months, returning to active duties at the end of the year.

Affiliations

• Stripe: Engineer, then first Chief Technology Officer, 2010 to 2015-05.
• OpenAI: Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, 2015-12 to 2018.
• OpenAI: President, 2018 to 2023-11-17.
• OpenAI: President, 2023-11-21 to present (with sabbatical from 2024-08 to 2024-11).

Notable contributions

Brockman's body of public work centers on engineering-leadership and product-launch roles at two of the most consequential software organizations of the past fifteen years.

• Stripe early engineering (2010 to 2015). Fourth employee at the payments startup founded by Patrick and John Collison; promoted to first Chief Technology Officer in 2013. Stripe's growth across the period he led engineering established the company as one of the dominant payments infrastructure providers in Silicon Valley and a frequent reference for developer-experience-led product design.
• OpenAI co-founding (December 2015). One of eleven publicly named co-founders of the lab incorporated as a nonprofit research organization in San Francisco. Initial role as Chief Technology Officer; promoted to President in 2018.
• OpenAI Gym (April 2016). Open-source toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement-learning algorithms. The Gym interface became a standard environment specification across academic and industrial reinforcement-learning research before the project was eventually maintained as Gymnasium under the Farama Foundation.
• OpenAI Five (2017 to 2019). The Dota 2 reinforcement-learning system that defeated the OG world-champion human team in April 2019. Brockman led the engineering and infrastructure work behind the project, which served as an early demonstration of large-scale self-play training at OpenAI.
• GPT-3 (June 2020). Co-author on the "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners" paper led by Tom Brown, the OpenAI release that established the few-shot prompting paradigm in large language models.
• ChatGPT (November 2022). Senior engineering and product leadership on the consumer-facing release of the GPT-3.5 family that became one of the fastest-adopted software applications in history.
• GPT-4 (March 2023). Senior engineering and product lead on the multimodal flagship model. Brockman conducted the public live-stream demonstration on March 14, 2023 that introduced GPT-4 to developers and the press.
• Public-talk record. Lex Fridman Podcast #17 on OpenAI and AGI from April 2019; the GPT-4 developer live demo from March 2023; the TED 2023 talk "The inside story of ChatGPT's astonishing potential."

Investments and boards

No public personal angel-investor activity on record in AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, or energy as of May 2026. Brockman's footprint in this section is concentrated in his founding and operating roles at Stripe and OpenAI rather than a parallel investing program.

Network

Brockman's strongest professional partnership is with Sam Altman, the OpenAI Chief Executive Officer with whom he has worked continuously since the founding meetings in 2015 and alongside whom he resigned during the November 2023 board crisis. The two are widely identified in industry coverage as the operating leadership of OpenAI through the post-2022 ChatGPT growth period.

His OpenAI co-founding cohort, with whom he has worked since December 2015, includes Ilya Sutskever, the former Chief Scientist who was central to the November 2023 board action and founded Safe Superintelligence in June 2024; John Schulman, the reinforcement-learning lead and co-founder who departed for Anthropic in August 2024 and then for Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025; Andrej Karpathy, the founding research scientist who left for Tesla in 2017 and returned briefly between 2023 and 2024; and Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer who founded Thinking Machines Lab in 2024. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, former senior OpenAI staff who departed in 2021 to found Anthropic, are now leading a direct frontier competitor.

His pre-OpenAI relationships at Stripe include the company's co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, with whom he worked from 2010 through 2015. Industry coverage from the early Stripe period frequently cites Brockman as a formative engineering presence in the company's developer-experience reputation.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Brockman is the longest-tenured senior leader at OpenAI and is widely identified in industry coverage as the operating engineering and product face of the company across the GPT, ChatGPT, and GPT-5 release cycles. The pairing with Sam Altman is frequently described in press coverage as a division of labor between an engineering President and a policy-and-business Chief Executive Officer, with Altman handling external-facing capital, regulatory, and AGI-framing work and Brockman handling the engineering organization, product launches, and live-demo presentations including the GPT-4 reveal in March 2023.

The Stripe-CTO pedigree is structurally distinctive among Frontier-lab leadership. Few senior leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, or xAI come from a comparable production-engineering and developer-platform background; the closest peer in this respect is Andrej Karpathy, whose Tesla Autopilot tenure provided a similar large-scale-engineering reference point. The Stripe period is widely cited in industry coverage of his engineering judgment and is referenced in his Wikipedia entry, the Berkeley News profile of John Schulman, and Patrick Collison's public commentary on the Stripe early team.

The November 2023 OpenAI board episode is a defining event in his public record. He resigned in solidarity with Altman on November 17, 2023, and was named to a proposed Microsoft research role on November 19 before returning to OpenAI on November 21 after Altman's reinstatement. The episode is referenced in nearly all subsequent press coverage of his role at OpenAI and is the most widely cited public moment in his post-Stripe career.

Outlook

Open questions over the next 6 to 18 months:

• Engineering leadership through the GPT-6 cycle. Whether Brockman remains the operating face for the next OpenAI flagship release as the company moves through the GPT-5.x cadence and toward GPT-6.
• Stargate execution. OpenAI's Stargate infrastructure joint venture with Microsoft, Oracle, and SoftBank has a publicly stated $500 billion compute target. The engineering organization Brockman leads is the primary internal counterpart to the build-out.
• OpenAI corporate restructuring. Reports of unwinding the capped-profit subsidiary under the nonprofit parent have continued through 2025 and 2026 without a final structure. The eventual form determines the equity and governance position of senior leadership including Brockman.
• Musk lawsuit outcome. The Elon Musk federal-court trial in Oakland that opened in late April 2026 includes a request to remove both Altman and Brockman from their OpenAI roles as part of the relief sought.
• Public commentary frequency. Whether Brockman maintains the relatively low public-talk and podcast cadence that has characterized his post-2023 record, or returns to the higher visibility of the 2019 to 2022 period.
• Long-term role at OpenAI. Whether the post-2023 stability of the President role continues through any further corporate-restructuring or board episodes, given the November 2023 precedent.

Sources

• Greg Brockman. Wikipedia biographical entry covering education, the Stripe period, the OpenAI co-founding, and the November 2023 board crisis.
• gregbrockman.com. Brockman's personal site with his project list, talk archive, and public-writing index.
• blog.gregbrockman.com. Brockman's personal blog with long-form posts on engineering and on the OpenAI mission.
• Language Models are Few-Shot Learners. The June 2020 GPT-3 paper led by Tom Brown, with Brockman among the named OpenAI co-authors.
• GPT-4 Developer Livestream. The March 14, 2023 public live demonstration of GPT-4 led by Brockman.
• The inside story of ChatGPT's astonishing potential. Brockman's TED 2023 talk on ChatGPT and OpenAI.
• Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #17. The April 2019 long-form interview on OpenAI, AGI, and reinforcement learning.
• Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI. Wikipedia entry on the November 2023 board crisis day-by-day, including Brockman's resignation, the proposed Microsoft role, and his return to OpenAI.
• OpenAI announces leadership transition. OpenAI's November 17, 2023 announcement of Sam Altman's removal and the subsequent leadership decisions.
• OpenAI Gym. The April 2016 reinforcement-learning toolkit GitHub repository.
• OpenAI Five. Wikipedia entry on the Dota 2 reinforcement-learning system that defeated the OG world champions in April 2019.
• Photo: TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019, Day 2, CC BY 2.0 Steve Jennings / TechCrunch.