OpenAI's executive exodus has one big winner

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**Nilay Patel** (1:41)
Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Hayden Field, The Verge's senior AI reporter, about some pure Decoder bait, the seemingly endless org chart changes at OpenAI, and how all of them have seemed to consolidate power under co-founder Greg Brockman, the company's president. While Sam Altman is the CEO and still OpenAI's most public face, Brockman has amassed enormous power and influence within the top ranks of the company, as other senior leaders have left in rapid succession these past few months. Brockman now oversees the company's entire consumer and enterprise product teams, including ChattGBT, Codex, and its major infrastructure buildout. As Hayden reported last week, Brockman is now effectively the day-to-day operational leader of OpenAI. This will obviously have major effects on both OpenAI as a company and its product strategy at a time when it continues to cede ground to Anthropic in the enterprise and is preparing for an historic IPO, all against the backdrop of needing to turn a profit in the next few years and the company's huge ambitions to replace both Google Search and the iPhone in the consumer market. So I wanted Hayden to break down for me what's going on at OpenAI and the increasingly important role Greg Brockman will play in its future. Okay, Verge Senior AI Reporter Hayden Field and Greg Brockman's Consolidation of Power at OpenAI. Here we go.
Hayden Field, you're the Verge Senior AI Reporter. Welcome back to Decoder.

**Hayden Field** (2:58)
Thanks, it's great to be here.

**Nilay Patel** (3:00)
Always chaos when you're here, Hayden.

**Hayden Field** (3:02)
Absolutely, there's never a calm week. If there's a calm week coming up, I know something's even crazier is coming the next week.

**Nilay Patel** (3:10)
We should just rename the show The Real Housewives of AI.

**Hayden Field** (3:12)
Yep, honestly, that would be fitting.

**Nilay Patel** (3:15)
Straight up, that's what we should do. A lot of personalities, a lot of feelings, a lot of relationships that people have really come to value over a long period of time.

**Hayden Field** (3:22)
Yeah, and a lot of lore, a lot of lore that goes between all these people for years and years and years. It's crazy. And now, they're even putting out profiles on some of their spouses. Yeah, the circles and the people themselves are really interesting.

**Nilay Patel** (3:39)
So today, the drama is around OpenAI, and specifically Greg Brockman, who seems to be consolidating ever more power at OpenAI. You just wrote a long story about this. It seems very clear that Greg is emerging as the central decision maker at OpenAI. Describe what's going on.

**Hayden Field** (3:55)
Greg has obviously been pretty influential at OpenAI for a really long time. But what's different now is that he has so much control over the day-to-day operations in a way he didn't before. He was always a co-founder. He was always heavily involved. It was him, Ilya Tsatskova, and Sam Altman for a long time, all in these e-mail threads that came out during the Musk v Altman trial. We saw them all talking about the future of OpenAI, what it should look like, all their strange dynamics with Elon Musk. But now, Brockman was in a big-picture role before. Now, he's increasingly taking on so much power in the day-to-day. Altman has been focusing more on big-picture, IPO stuff, the direction of the company at large. Brockman is amassing all this power day-to-day as their executives leave.