Greg Brockman on Why OpenAI Says We’re Entering the AGI Era

Greg Brockman (0:00)

We're now in the AGI era. Astra has really hit something that I'm like, okay, I think this is pretty reasonable to call it AGI. We've seen it run coherently for 24 hours to go accomplish tasks that I think are quite amazing.

Ben Horowitz (0:12)

The models will be plenty powerful, but it'll be hard to get to everybody given that we won't have enough compute to serve at all.

Greg Brockman (0:18)

You don't win the Super Bowl by saying, I want to win the Super Bowl. You win it by blocking and tackling. You really have to make sure that safety, security, alignment, those are all standards that you're constantly upleveling. I think that's gonna be a huge challenge people are underestimating.

Erik Torenberg (0:29)

You've made two very big bets in your career, helping build Stripe early and helping, of course, found OpenAI.

Greg Brockman (0:34)

The world needs to act with urgency.

Ben Horowitz (0:36)

Yeah, we're in a very dangerous window right now.

Greg Brockman (0:38)

We declared a code red. We took 25% of our production engineers and said, sorry, all your projects are on hold. You are now defending. I, throughout OpenAI, have always focused on whatever is the most important problem. For the past two years, it's been the data centers, the infrastructure, the machine learning.

Erik Torenberg (0:56)

Do you know what the next year will focus on?

Greg Brockman (0:58)

I think this is going to become the most important conversation.

Erik Torenberg (1:01)

Ten years ago, Greg Brockman and Ilya Suskever estimated that AGI might be 10 to 15 years away. Today, Greg says we're entering what OpenAI calls the AGI era. In this episode, I sit down with Ben Horowitz and OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman to talk about what has changed and what comes next. Greg explains why computer use could fundamentally change our relationship with software, how OpenAI used 10,000 agents to tackle a major mathematics problem, and why increasingly capable models are creating both new possibilities and new security risks. They also get into OpenAI's response to recent summer security developments, why Greg believes defenders have a critical window to use Frontier AI to secure their systems, and how the company is thinking about safety as capabilities advance.

Greg describes the AI he thinks we were actually promised. Not another text box, but an assistant with memory and context that knows you, works proactively, and can help across both your personal and professional life.

Greg, welcome to the A16z Podcast.

Greg Brockman (2:08)

Thank you for having me.

Erik Torenberg (2:09)

So Greg, you've made two very big bets in your career, helping build Stripe early and helping, of course, found OpenAI. If we were talking 10 years ago and you were predicting, what would the world look like in 2026 as relates to AI, would you be able to predict that we would be making the breakthroughs that you've made today, or what would you tell them about what you would expect?

Greg Brockman (2:28)

Well, so Ilya and I actually spent a lot of time trying to predict what it would look like, what the timelines would be. I remember we did some math on compute in around 2016, 2017

We came to the conclusion that if you look at Moore's law progress, that kind of thing, 15 years felt like about the timeline to AGI. If you really squinted at it and you're willing to scale up and build massive supercomputers, and the hundreds of billions of dollars, that kind of thing, that maybe would be 10 So I actually feel like in some ways, obviously what's happening, it's remarkable. It's this amazing moment for everyone to be a part of, and to be able to help shape collectively. But it also feels a little bit like maybe it's the conclusion of a lot of forces that are all coming together for this moment. If you step back and really take that macro view, it makes sense it's happening now.

Ben Horowitz (3:19)

Do you think we're currently, because you guys slightly underestimated the timeline, or I guess it was basically on point. Do you think we're still on the timeline given we're now starting to drive real shortages on the supply chain?

Greg Brockman (3:34)

Well, look, I do think that we are in a world where it is hard for compute to keep up with the demand that we're already seeing in the market, just in terms of how people are going to use this technology benefit from it. I do think it's going to be very hard for us to scale the raw potential and capability of these models to everyone. And that's part of what we try to do. And so I think that the progress, I do see like we have line of sight to continue to make the models much more capable, safe and aligned, but also really distributing that power and the benefits and the empowerment to everyone. I think that's going to be a huge challenge people are underestimating.