OpenAI President Greg Brockman: AI Self-Improvement, The Superapp Bet, Path To AGI, Scaling Compute

**Greg Brockman** (0:00)
I think it's extremely clear that we are going to have AGI within the next couple of years in a way that is still going to be jagged, but that the floor of task will just be almost for any intellectual task of how you use your computer. The AI will be able to do that. The scariest moment at OpenAI was actually after we launched Catchy PT. And I remember being at the holiday party and just feeling this vibe of week one. I have never felt that.
I was like, no, that we are the underdog and we always have been. From the moment we launched Catchy PT, I remember talking with my team, having this exact conversation. I said, how much compute should we buy? I said, all of it. I said, no, no, no, really. How much compute should we buy? I said, no matter how much we try to build, I know we're not going to be able to keep up with the demand.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:47)
OpenAI co-founder and president, Greg Brockman, joins us to talk about AI's most promising opportunities, how OpenAI plans to capitalize on them, and what the super app is all about. Greg is with us here in studio today. Greg, great to see you.

**Greg Brockman** (1:01)
Thank you for having me.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:02)
Well, we're speaking at a time where OpenAI is shutting down video generation and focusing its energies on a super app, which is going to combine business and coding use cases. I think from the outside, those of us watching this are like including myself. OpenAI is winning in consumer, and now it's shifting its resources, what is happening?

**Greg Brockman** (1:26)
Well, the way I would think about this is that we have been in a world where we're developing this technology, deep learning, to really see can it have the positive impact that we have always pictured, can it be used to build applications that help people, that help them in their lives? We've separately had a arm that's saying, let's actually try to deploy this technology, whether that's to help sustain the business, to start getting some practice with getting real world impact, those kinds of things, for the time when this technology actually comes to fruition, that it actually becomes the everything that we've imagined, that we started this company to try to have. And I think that we're at a moment now where we've really seen this technology, it's going to work, and that we're moving out of testing on benchmarks and sort of these almost cerebral demonstrations of capability to it actually being the case that for us to develop it further, we need to see it in the real world and get feedback from how people are using it in knowledge work and various applications. And so the way I think about it is that this is a bigger strategic shift because of the phase of the technology. And it's not so much that we're saying removing from consumer to B2B. It's really what we're saying is that what are the most important applications that we can focus on? Because we can't focus on everything, right? But what are the things that we can bring to life that will actually synergize together as we build them, and that will deliver meaningful impact and help elevate everyone. And when we look at the list, so there's consumer, you can think of it as many things, but there's a personal assistant, right? Something that knows you, that's aligned with your goals, it's going to help you achieve whatever it is that you want in your life. There's also creative expression and entertainment and many other applications.
On the business side, maybe you can, if you zoom out, it looks more like one thing of just, you have a hard task, can the AI go do it, does it have all the context to do all these things? And for us, it's very clear that the stack rank includes two things at the top. One is the personal assistant, the other is the AI that can go and solve hard problems for you. And when we look at the compute we have, we are not even going to have enough compute to fund those two things. And then once we start adding in many other applications, many other things that AI is going to be very useful for, and is going to help people with, we just can't possibly get to all of them. And so I think that this is a recognition of the maturation of the technology and the incredible impact it's going to have very quickly, and our need to prioritize and to actually pick the set of applications that we want to shine and to really bring to the world.