Greg Brockman (Part 1)

**Greg Brockman** (0:23)
One thing that's really changed over the course of 2025 was people started to use ChatGPT for much more personal, very intimate applications. For example, so my wife has complex medical conditions, including hypermobile Erlest-Danlos syndrome, which took many years for us to get diagnosed. And as we put those symptoms into ChatGPT, it would be able to figure out pretty immediately. But the thing is that every doctor has their own specialty rather than one doctor who can see across everything. And she uses ChatGPT to manage her health all the time.

**Rick Rubin** (1:00)
Great.

**Greg Brockman** (1:00)
For me, the funny thing is I'm actually a late adopter of our own technologies usually. And I usually test them and I stress test them in all sorts of ways. And it's funny for early versions of our models, I would usually like try to break some of their filters. And so I would swear at them and yell at them. And my wife is always like, he's just kidding, you know, telling me to be nice to the AI. And I think that for me, I actually have been someone who's almost very set in my ways. And the first time this has changed is very recently with Codex. And really starting in December, like I've been a curmudgeon, I've got my way of doing things. I use my terminal, I use my Emacs, like all these like tools that I grew up with. And I've just abandoned all of that now.

**Rick Rubin** (1:46)
Wow.

**Greg Brockman** (1:46)
I'm just using Codex.

**Rick Rubin** (1:47)
That's revolutionary.

**Greg Brockman** (1:49)
It really is.

**Rick Rubin** (1:49)
You sound like you were set in your ways.

**Greg Brockman** (1:51)
I really was, yes.

**Rick Rubin** (1:53)
What changes with each new model?

**Greg Brockman** (1:56)
Everything. And the way to think about it is that we, from the outside, perception is, oh, you're just scaling up the models, you're just doing this kind of dumb thing. On the inside, every single part of the process, we are always up-leveling. Like the thing that works in machine learning and that machine learning rewards is attention to detail. And so you really want to make sure that all of the scaling is right. You want to make sure that the systems, for example, GPUs failing, that happens. And so how do you detect if you have a run of 100,000 GPUs, how do you detect which GPU is the broken one? It's not easy, right? You can't just be like that one, right? So you need this almost, there's a physical process to it, there's the software process to it, there's understanding if your data is any good, and that there's so much reward to just actually looking at the data to understand what's in there and to make sure that you formatted it correctly and that it's tokenized properly. So there's just every single part of the input we are constantly improving, and we pay attention a lot to the output too. We're trying to see how does improvement here connect to an eval shifting. One observation I have across many years of OpenAI is that, if we have some signs of life, some application that works right now, one year from now, you should expect it to be excellent. So we are on this exponential and able to make these very, very sophisticated improvements over time.

**Rick Rubin** (3:19)
Tell me about your co-founder, Sam. He seems to generate strong reactions out in the world.

**Greg Brockman** (3:25)
I think Sam is very misunderstood by the world. And I think that the way I think about Sam is that he is a very good person. And that goodness is something that gets held against him. And it's very much, no good deed goes unpunished. And I think that some of the critics, I run through my mental filter of every accusation is a confession. That I think that people project on to him things that they see in themselves they're insecure about or that they want on their own. And I think he's very resilient. He's been through a lot and that I'm very grateful for him, honestly, being at the center of so much attention and to continue going because he's been very critical to OpenAI becoming what it is today. And I think that there is no one who I think could have kind of filled that role as well as he has to date.

**Rick Rubin** (4:17)
It's also nice that he can take all the arrows so you could continue doing the work.

**Greg Brockman** (4:21)
I wasn't going to say it that way, but it is true and it's something I'm deeply grateful for.