OpenAI Co-Founder: AI Goes Parabolic! Here's What's Next | Greg Brockman

**Shane Parrish** (0:00)
So, how did OpenAI come about?

**Greg Brockman** (0:02)
I knew I wanted to do a startup, because I felt like that was something-

**Shane Parrish** (0:06)
But you were just in a startup, Stripe was a startup.

**Greg Brockman** (0:08)
It's true, but I never, I felt like Stripe, the problem that we were solving was not my problem, right? It wasn't the problem I'd grown up thinking about. It was an important problem that I dedicated myself to that mission for a number of years. But I felt like it was going to succeed with or without me. And so, then I had a first moment to really think about, what is a mission that I want to dedicate myself to, where I would spend the rest of my life working on this problem just to see it play out in a slightly better way.
And it was very clear to me that top of the list was AI, right? If you can actually make a difference in how AI will play out in the world, that would be a life well lived.

**Shane Parrish** (0:50)
When you were thinking about leaving, Patrick told you to go talk to Sam Altman. What happened in that conversation?

**Greg Brockman** (0:56)
Well, Patrick had said, Sam has seen lots of young people in your situation. And Patrick, I think, really hoped that Sam would convince me to stay. A few minutes of talking to Sam, he's like, okay, you clearly have already decided. It is very obvious. And so he asked, well, what are you planning on doing next? And I said, well, I'm thinking about doing an AI company. And he said, I'm also thinking about doing something in AI. We should keep in touch. So I had talked to Sam maybe one more time after I was leaving Stripe.
And he asked, are you still thinking about doing something in AI? I said, yes. He said, I'm also starting to get more details and putting together this dinner in July. And I flew out for the dinner.
And the thing that I remember was a topic was, is it too late to start a lab with many of the best researchers? Is it possible?

**Shane Parrish** (1:49)
And this is what year?

**Greg Brockman** (1:50)
2015, right? Because you think about just the degree to which DeepMind had all the researchers, all the capital, all the data. It just felt like, is it even possible to get something off the ground still? People came up with all sorts of reasons it was hard. No one could come up with a reason it was actually impossible. And so Sam and I driving back to the city that night, I remember we looked at each other and we said, we got to do this.
We just have to. And so next day I was full time on putting this together. And it was tough because it was very ill defined. We had a mission, a vision of saying, we think that we can build human level AI, make it be something positive for the world, make the benefits be something that are distributed broadly.
But how? And how do you get people to actually leave their jobs to come and join this thing? Initially the set of people that I narrowed down to were actually Ilya, Dario, Amadai, Chris Sola and myself. That was going to be the team. And we spent a lot of time together, we spent a lot of time talking about potential visions for the lab, potential ways that things would work. It didn't quite come together and that there was just partly a question of will this have enough momentum? Dario felt like that he needed to go and establish a name for himself, and he wasn't sure if this was really going to be it. It was a question of just how it was all going to work. In the meanwhile, I was trying to get John Schulman interested. He said that he was going to do it. Dario and Chris ended up deciding to go to Google Brain, and so it was really just Ilya, me and John starting to be maybe a few others. So I had a group of about 10 people that many of them were saying I'm interested, but who else is in? I asked Sam, okay, how do we break symmetry here?
How do we actually get everyone to say, all right, we're joining? Sam's suggestion was invite people out for an offsite. So we set up a thing in Napa and I actually made T-shirts.
At the time we were going to-

**Shane Parrish** (3:44)
And this is before they joined?

**Greg Brockman** (3:45)