Silicon Valley GirlOpenAI Co-Founder: Start Building With AI Before You Feel Ready | Greg Brockman
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
35 min read · 7,192 words- 0:00 – 0:59
Why aren’t we using more of what AI can do?
- GBGreg Brockman
We're gonna see this massive renaissance of entrepreneurship. Like, I think it is coming. I think it's really gonna kick in over the next year to two years.
- MMMarina Mogilko
This is Greg, co-founder of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which more than a billion users use every week.
- GBGreg Brockman
I'm pretty good at writing software. I don't write software anymore. I direct an AI for it to write software. I provide lots of feedback and guidance.
- MMMarina Mogilko
When people are building software, how do you strategize around building something that's not gonna be made obsolete with the new models? I'm just about to show you something that I've built recently. Um, am I ambitious enough with AI?
- GBGreg Brockman
Well, I think the answer to being ambitious enough will always be no-
- MMMarina Mogilko
[laughs]
- GBGreg Brockman
... because there's always more we can do.
- MMMarina Mogilko
For someone who is willing to step up their agent game and they have one hour, where do they start this weekend?
- GBGreg Brockman
I'd say, first of all-
- MMMarina Mogilko
This video is sponsored by HubSpot. I want to talk all things practical. I was recently talking to Nobel Prize laureate in economics, and the one theme kept coming up that
- 0:59 – 2:16
What a proactive AI assistant could do for you
- MMMarina Mogilko
we have such capable AI models, but we lack applications. What do you think that you're launching this year will help change that and help people realize what's the power of AI?
- GBGreg Brockman
Well, it's been very interesting to see, first of all, how many people use ChatGPT. You know, we have 1.2 billion weekly active users. We have, like, 300 million people who use chat every single week for health queries, right, to help them in their personal lives. At the same time, how many of those use cases just scratch the surface. And we see this in the metrics, that if people use chat for three different use cases, so three different things that you realize chat could do for you, you become a power user. You become ... You retain. You, you keep using chat, and you wanna use it more. But getting to those three use cases, it's such a hard challenge.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And in some ways, it kinda makes sense because ... Okay, so here's this AI that can do anything, but what's one thing it can do, right? It's like sometimes someone's going-
- MMMarina Mogilko
What is the magic thing, right?
- GBGreg Brockman
Exactly, right.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And so really find that magic that speaks to you. But also at the same time, I think it shows this massive opportunity, this massive space that's almost a gap where you have ... You're talking to an AI, and the AI knows what it's capable of, and it could suggest to you, "Hey, you asked me to do this thing for you. Actually, I could do even more," right? "Here's an idea. I can make a whole presentation, a spreadsheet." So that's actually been something we've been exploring. But I feel like there's something here about the fact that what you want out of AI is simplicity,
- 2:16 – 4:15
Why Greg no longer writes software himself
- GBGreg Brockman
right? You don't want an interface that has buttons and sliders and model pickers. Like, none of that. That's not the AI we were promised.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
You want something you can talk to, that can solve problems, that can help you, can help solve goals, but that can actually even pr- be proactive. That can say to you, "Hey, you've got this email that's in your inbox that you've been ignoring this person for the past couple days, and, uh, that actually I did some research, and it turns out that here's, like, the right answer to the question, and I've drafted an answer. Do you approve?"
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And by the way, the use case I just mentioned, it's not theoretical. With Dots, I actually got that exactly, uh, this, this, this use case happening to me right before we, we started this podcast. And so I think we're at a point now where AI is actually able to be much more proactive and to remove so much of the burden of figuring out, like, what is this system capable of, and to really help you and then help you be able to achieve whatever it is that you wanna do.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Are there any other use cases that were unimaginable a year ago that are possible now and that people should be trying out?
- GBGreg Brockman
Well, I think so many, right? There's a whole spectrum of them, from ... And I think the way that I always recommend going to, to discovery is you gotta play with the system, or you gotta see what it's capable of. And so when it comes to coding, like, these models, they're now better at writing software than basically anyone I know, right? I'm pretty good at writing software.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
Like, I don't write software anymore. I direct an AI for it to write software. I provide lots of feedback and guidance. So it's always fun to, like, make a little game and just kinda get this, this quick hit on just seeing, like, okay, how long did it take to deliver on that, and then ask for something more complex. I, I think that we're at a point now where Astra is so good at Blender, so good at 3D modeling, and so it's kinda fun to ask it to produce 3D models of a photo and th- those kinds of things. You can see it using software, like using Microsoft Paint to, to sketch out, uh, a photo. But you can ask for more real things too. Like, I know, for example, a friend who was designing or wanted to have a, like, guest house built and used Astra to actually produce CAD plans, and then brought those to a contractor, and now it's being built.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm-hmm.
- 4:15 – 6:00
I show Greg the AI app I built for this interview
- GBGreg Brockman
And so it's a very empowering thing. Normally you'd have to hire someone else.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
Like, I don't know how to make CAD plans. But now we have this intelligence in our pocket that can, can actually do these kinds of things for us. To me, one of the things I really like to do is to try to push the AI in different dimensions of, of my life. And so I think that voice mode is something that makes AI so accessible, right? You just go into voice mode, and you start talking to it. Voice mode now is hooked up to tools. S- so you can actually ask it to do anything that your chat can do. And if you're hooked up to your email, to your calendar, now you can ask it about, like, what's my schedule for today, or, like, what should I ... You know, I wanna s- free up some time for some deep thought. How can I do that? And it can actually go and have context on what's going on in each part of your calendar. And so I think that in my mind, that there's this activity of just stepping back and thinking about what's a slightly more ambitious thing I can ask my AI to do than it's done for me to date. Let's see if it works.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah. And I'm just about to show you something that I've built recently. I think we're in this era where everyone can build a personal productivity app multiple. And, uh, this one that I've built, so I basically asked it to create a- an app that's gonna prepare me for the podcast. I tell it who I'm interviewing, for how long, and what's my success metric, and it's basically the views on YouTube.
- GBGreg Brockman
Mm-hmm.
- MMMarina Mogilko
And then it goes ahead and creates a podcast. It does the research, uh, suggests topic to discuss. This is great, but how do I make it learn from my experience, right? And is there anywhere I can push this further? 'Cause I'm gonna record this conversation. It's gonna come here-
- GBGreg Brockman
Mm-hmm
- MMMarina Mogilko
... and it's gonna check. Now it's checking my previous conversations. But what do you think is missing here, and am I ambitious enough with AI?
- GBGreg Brockman
Well, I think the answer to being ambitious enough will always be no-
- MMMarina Mogilko
[laughs]
- GBGreg Brockman
... because there's always more we can do, right?
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And that's the beauty of AI, is that it's really about solving problems, helping you achieve what you wanna
- 6:00 – 7:10
How the app could help produce the final episode
- GBGreg Brockman
achieve. You know, there's no ceiling to what you might imagine, right? And so it's really just about- Sort of tuning that you were able to achieve a thing means maybe you can dream a little bit bigger. And so in, in my mind, yeah, I think this, I think this is a super, super cool app. So fir- first of all, I, in terms of just doing the background research, and maybe, uh, when you, when this was being built, the AI already went and looked at all my interviews that I've ever done, and-
- MMMarina Mogilko
It did.
- GBGreg Brockman
Ah, there we go. Did all the background research.
- MMMarina Mogilko
It did. It did the background re- the only thing is it c- still can't connect to social media-
- GBGreg Brockman
Mm
- MMMarina Mogilko
... but I think it's a, it's a plugin thing.
- GBGreg Brockman
Yep.
- MMMarina Mogilko
But then, yes, it went through your conversations.
- GBGreg Brockman
There we go. And then all of-
- MMMarina Mogilko
It has everything
- GBGreg Brockman
... all of OpenAI's past press releases. Oh, uh, there, we got a questions tab. I like that.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah, we got a questions tab.
- GBGreg Brockman
That's right.
- MMMarina Mogilko
And that's the title and thumbnail already here, and these are the questions that I can copy.
- GBGreg Brockman
Yes. I'd be curious how much it helps with the post-processing and the actual-
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm
- GBGreg Brockman
... production of the final, of the final video once it's done, right? Because this thing has all this context on me, on OpenAI, on the kinds of things that you've covered in your, your past episodes, and then how do you wanna cut it? Like, I've, I've heard there's so many good use cases of Astra helping with post-production for, for videos-
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm
- GBGreg Brockman
... and proactively being able to do that. And so
- 7:10 – 8:39
What small-business owners should focus on
- GBGreg Brockman
I think actually I'd be very curious if you could have an app where it's just, like, the only thing you have to do is basically look over the questions, make sure you like 'em, and if you don't, provide some feedback and it can do better. You show up, you actually do the interview, and then everything else is taken care of. How much work do you put in right now from the interview part to something actually being live on YouTube?
- MMMarina Mogilko
Oh, a lot of work. I have a, I b- I have a big team, but it's also we've documented a lot, and I've been doing this for 12 years-
- GBGreg Brockman
Mm-hmm
- MMMarina Mogilko
... so we have all the files that we referenced to, so it's easier to build with AI now, but it's still e- every episode is at least 40 hours.
- GBGreg Brockman
Wow. And if you could get back that time, right, so that the kind of all of the, the mechanics are taken care of, and so you can spend so much time really thinking about what the right interview is and all of the, the other things that go into this. We're really thinking about if you could scale, you could do way more interviews, like yeah, what would you do with that additional time?
- MMMarina Mogilko
That's the question to you. With small businesses h- that are applying AI for their day-to-day jobs, what is the role of the business owner? What should they be thinking more of, and where's actually the bottleneck for the business now?
- GBGreg Brockman
I think that there's something fundamental. So first of all, we see so many small businesses that are being started because people feel secure with the fact that they have ChatGPT, right? That there's so many pieces of expertise that if you wanna get a business off the ground, it's hard, right? But you actually have a PhD level intelligence, a world expert business consultant. You have all these things in your pocket now for free.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
It's, like, pretty remarkable, right? And if you're willing, if you, if you're able to pay, you can get even so much more depth and so much more compute towards any problem you want. So small business is easier to start than
- 8:39 – 9:18
The watch store and the world’s best programmer
- GBGreg Brockman
ever, and we're seeing it very concretely. And then people are able to, uh, when you talk to a lot, many of the small business owners, the, there's just so many tasks that they outsource to an AI that, you know, certainly there's the ones that they knew that they had to do, but there's so many tasks that they would just no one would've done it before.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And so little holes in their business strategy or thinking about how do you actually produce this document. The other thing too is, is small business owners who don't even realize what they could be doing. Like, one of our, our employees was telling me that he was, um, shopping for, for watches. He was in this, like, antique watch store, and the, he started talking to the owner about AI, and that the owner was like, "Oh, AI, I can't use that for anything. Like, you know, I'm, I'm a, I'm a watch store." And he was like, "No, no, no. AI can help everyone. Let me show you."
- 9:18 – 10:01
Raising the ceiling of ambition
- GBGreg Brockman
And so he talked about some of the problems he has, and he's like, well, yeah, he doesn't really have a website. And so-
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah
- GBGreg Brockman
... you just pull out-
- MMMarina Mogilko
That's the easiest one-
- GBGreg Brockman
Exactly, right
- MMMarina Mogilko
... to, like, yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
And just, like, ChatGPT Voice being like, "Build me a website. Build an awesome website." And then the owner said, "Hey, I also have... Each watch has its own story," right? And so it's just, like, then becomes very easy to be like, okay, talk to the AI about, here are the story behind each watch, and you end up with this beautiful visualization of everything, and you just realize that there's this, this way that technology becomes alive that normally it's almost inaccessible to so many people. And so I think that this really pushing on if you had, like, the world's best programmer o- on your payroll, what would you put them to work on?
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And, and that now you can do it.
- MMMarina Mogilko
I think you mentioned somewhere that it's actually ambition that small businesses have to start working on,
- 10:01 – 11:16
What makes an AI app worth paying for?
- MMMarina Mogilko
right?
- GBGreg Brockman
Yes, yes, and I th- I think that is-
- MMMarina Mogilko
I think it's fascinating.
- GBGreg Brockman
I, I agree. And I think it is really about we can all raise a ceiling of ambition, right? We can all accomplish more. People who really lean into that, I think we're already starting to see really remarkable things. I'll tell you another example, by the way, is, um, that, that we have, uh, there are these two, two brothers who are, who are blind who use our technology, and, uh, that they use it to, uh, both in their daily life and, and for, for their work. And even for tasks like being able to plug, uh, the cable into the right port on a computer, right? You can use ChatGPT to, to actually basically provide that information when normally they would have to ask someone for, for help. And so I think this kind of empowerment, you know, being able to help people be able to be more independent, be able to l- live their life the way that they want, all of that, it's happening. It's happening right now at massive scale.
- MMMarina Mogilko
When someone is thinking of building something in software, when OpenAI is building so much around, like, work and productivity, what do you think makes an app worth paying for?
- GBGreg Brockman
There's definitely parts of what app building used to be that's becoming commoditized. It's becoming accessible to everyone. It's becoming massively democratized, and I think that's a really important thing and beautiful thing, right? That there can just be more software. And so then the question of, yeah, what is differentiation becomes even more important. I think that there is going to be
- 11:16 – 12:56
The coming renaissance of entrepreneurship
- GBGreg Brockman
more room than ever for software that adds value in unique ways, and some of this is really about deeply understanding the problem. Some of this is deeply understanding your users, right? You think about something like if you want to build something for education, there's teachers, there's parents, there's students, right? That there's so many stakeholders that you have to really think about. There's the administrators. How do you build a product that actually gives the right information, has the right guardrails, that is useful in the right ways, and who are you selling to? All these questions. And so I think that these, like, human factors of what is the core of the business, what is it that you have discovered, what is it that's your insight, what is your unique way of looking at the world?
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And I think that the mechanics of how you Instantiate that. How does... You know, do you have to write in C++ or Swift or something? Like, who cares about that?
- MMMarina Mogilko
Doesn't matter anymore.
- GBGreg Brockman
Like, that was never what the barrier should've been.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah. I've seen that YC startups, the recent batches are 60% B2B, and my intuition is telling me with these tools available to us, if I want to become an entrepreneur, I've seen so many problems in consumer. Do you think we're gonna enter this era when more and more people are building consumer businesses?
- GBGreg Brockman
Well, I think that the line between what enterprise and consumer are is gonna blur.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
I think that what a company is is going to become just less well-defined in some ways, or it's going to be less like, okay, a company is like these, like, big masses of humans that are organized in certain ways. I think people are gonna be so empowered, right? We're gonna see this massive renaissance of entrepreneurship. Like, I think it is coming. I think we're seeing the leading edges of it, but it's really, I think, really gonna kick in over the next year to two years. And I think that the question of are you selling to consumers or enterprises, there are some things that will remain true
- 12:56 – 13:50
HubSpot Smart CRM
- GBGreg Brockman
in terms of the split. Like, I think that when I think about what enterprise sales is, it's funt- fundamentally about relationships. But if you think about it as relationships, it's like, well, the reason that you can't really do enterprise sales to consumers is 'cause there's just too many consumers, right? It's just too high of a scale.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
It's too expensive. But if you have AI that really amplifies your ability to have relationships, really meaningful ones, and, and really take care of people at massive scale, then actually maybe the enterprise sales motion becomes something that makes sense even for more consumer businesses. But the mechanics of what a business is, I think, will evolve. I think that the how you relate to your users will evolve. But the fundamentals of that you want to be delivering value and you want to build a relationship with the people who are receiving that value and have it be a bidirectional exchange, all of that is gonna become much more front and center regardless of which domain.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Greg is talking about how much more you can do now even with a tiny team. If that makes you think, "Maybe I can start
- 13:50 – 15:48
How to build something better models won’t make obsolete
- MMMarina Mogilko
that business," I want you to think about your first customer. You want to listen, understand what they need, and do a great job. And you also have notes, follow-ups, and a spreadsheet to update. Our sponsor, HubSpot, helps with that. Its new Smart CRM is a CRM that updates itself, keeping your customer information and conversations together. Its AI note taker captures customer calls, drafts follow-ups, and suggests next steps and updates to customer records for you to approve so more of your attention can go to the people you're building this business for. Check out HubSpot Smart CRM through the link in the description, and thanks HubSpot for sponsoring this episode. Now back to Greg. When people are building, um, software, how do you strategize around building something that's not gonna be made obsolete with the new models?
- GBGreg Brockman
There are some activities I think scale well as the models get smarter, and some activities that are kind of working around limitations in the model. The second one is pretty hard to be durable.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And so I think the- there are at various points been startups that really focus on it. We take the model, we add some prompts, we add some very handcrafted whatever. And it's not to say that there's, there's a point in time where that is valuable, and sometimes it's even about the interface, right? That at, at each mo- level of model capability, there's almost a new interface that suggests itself. In 2022, we had an AI that was personalized enough that it was worthwhile reading the responses, like GPT-4.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
So it's like, of course you want to turn, make a ChatGPT at 3.5. And GPT-4, you know, end of, of 2025, I'd say, is when the coding agent era really started, and that was like you had AI that kind of shifted from being 20% of your software production to 80% of your software production. And so you just want a very different product that captures that, that thing... This is the thing that everyone's going to utilize. Now I think we're starting to enter this era of the personalized agent. So you're gonna have a cloud-based AI, and this is being reified, number of different form factors. OpenAI, we, we just released Dots. I'm super excited about it. I think it's got the smartest model backing up this, this kind of, uh, of technology, and it's
- 15:48 – 17:38
Why domain expertise is an AI advantage
- GBGreg Brockman
so useful. It's useful to me. I think it's- would be useful for lots of people. And so I think that the core thing is thinking about where will you scale as the models get smarter. And again, some of this is about understanding the industry. Some of this is about building relationships with, back to if you think about hospitals, right? There's so many different stakeholders there, right? That there's the patient, the doctor, the hospital admin. There's the, uh, insurance provider. There's so many different parties. And so how do you build trust across each of those and have a product that's useful to them, and then actually be able to, even if you're... Yeah, when you think about it, if you have a model that's just even better, if you are already in that industry, you have these customers that actually your product gets better-
- MMMarina Mogilko
Hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... and more defensible as a result.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Is there anything you're particularly looking forward to, um, seeing startups, uh, use models to build something?
- GBGreg Brockman
I think the domain expertise is-
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm
- GBGreg Brockman
... also really key. 'Cause one thing that's easy to miss is that as something like OpenAI, we have this technology that's so broad, right? It kind of touches every single aspect of economic growth and development, people in their personal lives, work lives. There's something for everyone, something that can really help them, something to help them achieve their goals. But often in any specific vertical, we're so far from optimal, right? That if you, you almost think of the economy as this fractal thing, right? Where it's like you zoom in, you're like, "Okay, here's a sector of, like, healthcare." And then you zoom in and you, like, really look at the number of different companies and the number of different ways of doing things. And no matter what sector you pick, there's just so much low-hanging fruit.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
That's actually been one of the most interesting and surprising things for me in building OpenAI, is to realize that there's just so much suboptimality in the economy in terms of how you can actually have much more efficient process that gives people their time back, that actually delivers the value. To- Being able to connect across different fields is not something we do very much.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
Right? It's like people specialize.
- MMMarina Mogilko
And now it makes economic sense to build them out because five years ago they would be, like, a feature of a company. Now you can build a small company
- 17:38 – 19:48
Greg’s AI briefing agent
- MMMarina Mogilko
around that feature.
- GBGreg Brockman
Exactly. And I think that e- even these, like, classic sectors and domains are really because of the limitation of our tools. Again, you think about how do you become good, like an expert in any field, is like you go to school, you, like, specialize. And as humanity has learned more things, the- what it means to specialize becomes narrower and narrower.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
Like, if you're a biologist now, you get a PhD, there's, like, one specific reaction that you got your PhD on.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
Right? And it's like it's not connected to the whole system. And I think that when it comes to, to building a business, a question of can you have these much more hybrid things? So you think about things like edtech as an example of, like, you take people who understand about education, they understand technology, they mash them up, and that they're able to innovate and do new things. I wonder if we're gonna find that there's gonna be other domains that we've never thought about that actually mesh together super well.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Totally. That's the future of entrepreneurship, matching those domains and finding the right solution. Can you talk to me about a setup that you have that is sophisticated enough for me to compare? This. 'Cause sometimes people bash me in the comments for asking people like you about morning briefing agents, so let's not do [laughs] morning briefing agent. Let's do something that helps you run a company and be efficient, and something that people see, they will think it's an aha moment for their productivity.
- GBGreg Brockman
I would not poo-poo the morning briefing agent too much-
- MMMarina Mogilko
[laughs]
- GBGreg Brockman
... because I think that morning briefing agent has so much depth to it, right? There's the like, okay, yeah, it's like it kinda gave me some info where it's like, honestly, I could've just scrolled the notification myself. There's the version of it where it says like, "Here are the things that are pending," right? Like, "Here are these Slacks that you have not answered, um, and you really should get back to these people with this prioritization order." There's the next level of, "I have, like, done the research. You know, there's this question about, like, what our strategy should be in some particular market, and like I've actually gone and I even, like, you know, sort of looked at all of the presentations, and like here's, like, the things you need to, like, be paying attention to to make this decision." That third thing is, like, where I think we're at, right? It's, like, the, the AI that really can do very sophisticated research across a bunch of different things and provide a very compressed version of, of what I should be paying attention to. The thing I'm actually very excited about as a next step that we're not quite there yet, is the morning briefing agent, so to speak, that is like, "Hey, I actually called, like, you know, I called up these people. Like, I talked to, you know, these, these coworkers of yours.
- 19:48 – 20:59
How OpenAI measures AI’s effect on productivity
- GBGreg Brockman
I, like, talked to this external partner, and like, I got everything into perfect order. Like, I just need you to approve this purchase order, and like we're ready to go on the new whatever." AI that really is proactive and able to do things on your behalf, like, that's coming. And I think with Dots we actually have the technology for it. So I think we're gonna start seeing people really start to utilize that.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm.
- GBGreg Brockman
I think we have improvements to make and things like that. But I'd say in my mind, any of these use cases, there's so much depth to them, and, and that is to me the key thing about AI. If you just look at the label of an AI that writes software, okay, sure, we've had an AI that writes software for five years now, but the AI that writes software today, totally different from the AI that wrote software five years ago. And so I have a lot of appreciation for the depth of application that's possible, even if the, like, label on the tin is, like, the same thing and kind of everyone's heard it 100 times.
- MMMarina Mogilko
When you look at these use cases inside OpenAI, do you have, like, an internal metric how advances in models is actually- are actually translating into people's productivity?
- GBGreg Brockman
We publish blog posts on this as well. So we've done a decent amount of, of work looking at token usage and looking how it correlates with, like, lines of code or-
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... commits and PRs and things like that. And again, all these are proxy metrics. They're not perfect, but I think that another way that you can tell is AI really changing productivity
- 20:59 – 21:54
Greg’s AI chief of staff
- GBGreg Brockman
and how much, is if you ever have an internal outage, like if internally people can't get access to a model, um, how much they-
- MMMarina Mogilko
[laughs]
- GBGreg Brockman
... feel upset. Everyone's like, "I can't do my work." And you're like, okay, six months ago you had nothing like this, and now you're saying you can't do your work when you don't have it for two hours?
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
Like, how is that possible? But we see this all the time.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm.
- GBGreg Brockman
It's so, so cool. And I feel for myself, like, the kinds of things on the morning briefing agent axis that I do a lot of is I, like anytime I have a question about OpenAI, I just ask my agent. Like, I don't know why I would do anything else to start because it's just so efficient. It's like often ... And sometimes I even feel like I'm like being a little bit lazy of, like, there's like some message that someone has sent me with a doc in it, and I'm just, like, trying to vaguely remember where was it and, you know-
- MMMarina Mogilko
So it's just connected to everything.
- GBGreg Brockman
It's connected. Yes.
- MMMarina Mogilko
It can- it's gonna do your mail, uh, Slack, whatever you're using.
- GBGreg Brockman
Absolutely.
- MMMarina Mogilko
And it has all the information, so whenever you need something you just ask it.
- GBGreg Brockman
That's right.
- MMMarina Mogilko
And it has all the info.
- GBGreg Brockman
Yes, yes. And with, with computer use, it really closes the last mile of being able to connect to, to all my enterprise context. And so then that makes it so useful because
- 21:54 – 23:51
When is more AI compute worth it?
- GBGreg Brockman
I really have this chief of staff, and I actually have a human chief of staff who's also incredible-
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm
- GBGreg Brockman
... right? In that I kind of am able to, like, give her so much more leverage by not having to ask these basic questions that now my AI can answer. And some of these, you know, call, call it basic ans- questions are also quite sophisticated. Like for example, asking questions about different business metrics, right? So it actually has to then go and issue queries into our data warehouse and come up with like, you know, you're looking at, like, the growth in some market or the, you know, the retention curves or something like that. And I remember in, you know, my, my last job when I was at Stripe, that we had a data team that you would send, like, an email to, and then a week later they would come back with a, an answer to that, that query. And now I just ask the AI and it just does it. It's, it's incredible.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Do you ever see areas where people are underutilizing tokens? Do you want to tell people, like, "Use more tokens for this"?
- GBGreg Brockman
Oh, absolutely. And look, I think there's two dimensions to it. So one is that there was this era of token maxing, right? Where it's just like people were just blindly saying, "Throw more tokens at it," which is clearly not a primary objective, but it is a good proxy metric. If you're not trying to optimize tokens, you're probably going to then see improved co- productivity correlated with increased number of tokens, and we really do see it. We have leaderboards, we kind of look at that, and I think that we see, like, the people who tend to be the most sophisticated in their usage are just able to do really incredible things. Again, it r- all depends on the domain and things like that, but I love seeing, for example, in our finance team, like that they've really gone full AI, AI first-
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm
- GBGreg Brockman
... and I think that there's just, like, so many things where, like, workflows that used to take a long time for closing the books that are now just so much faster, right? And none of those are like ... Everyone just feels that increased productivity and how, how helpful it is. Uh, we have an earl- some early adopters from our comms team. I think that they're just, like, being able to manage, like you have an event with a bunch of journalists coming, and you're putting together a seating chart and trying to figure everyone's dietary preferences, and being able to manage all of that as one person because you have Codex that's actually taking care of so much of the backend for you.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
Like, that's all been happening since early this year. So we see these kinds of use cases for knowledge work productivity
- 23:51 – 25:29
Where to start with agents—and when to automate
- GBGreg Brockman
everywhere. And then of course, the thing that I think is also very easy to, to miss, and I think is actually coming soon for everyone, is the scientific discovery side of things, right? That we put a ton of compute into solving Navier-Stokes, you know, this, this big millennium problem, and that was like 10,000 agents for some number of days. Like, it's a lot of compute. And we're able to create new knowledge for humanity. And you think about actually at much smaller scale, I think it still is the case that we're seeing lots of breakthroughs happening. And so I just have this feeling of, like, I think the people who really point compute at the right problem, right? Have some judgment and some real thought on, like, what really matters, where's the compute going to be utilized, and then are willing to push the, that token budget high, we're really seeing this, like, sort of outsize impact.
- MMMarina Mogilko
I think it's a big question that a lot of people have who are starting using agents and automating for the first time. What do you start with? How do you think about that?
- GBGreg Brockman
This white page problem is, like, the hardest problem in AI in some ways, and utilizing AI is this question of where do you get started, what do you use? I think my answer is always start small. Like, just try something. Type something random, push enter, see what happens, right?
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
And, like, I think that then as soon as you get that feedback loop, then you can iterate, right?
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
You can improve. And so I think that find, like, a little pain point in your life, right? Whether it's ... Maybe it's an email in your inbox that you, you know, that you have been dreading replying to [laughs] or, you know, that, uh, you know it's gonna take a lot of work to do to, to get there. Um, and so then the first question is, well, how do I get the email to the AI, right? And so there's one answer, which you copy-paste it. There's another answer where you have your Gmail connector connected. And so I think that you can start very mechanically, very much
- 25:29 – 26:18
What should stay under human control?
- GBGreg Brockman
going through the, the effort yourself and then realize, okay, I've done this three times, I've done this five times, and now I understand how this process works. Let's automate it. And that, by the way, is, like, a general software engineering maxim. Like, that's very much how I've always approached when you build software versus when you just kind of do it m- mechanically, is after you've done it five times, it's probably a good time to s- to start automating. And so I think-
- MMMarina Mogilko
I like that, the five times metric-
- GBGreg Brockman
It's a, it's a pretty good one
- MMMarina Mogilko
... before you automate. Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
Exactly, yeah. And I think, I think that doing that for AI, 'cause that way you kind of keep your, your finger on the pulse of the problem-
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... uh, which I think is very important. Like, at the end of the day, you know, back to the question of what are small business owners doing with AI, accountability is something that remains with them, right? It's still the business is operating a certain way, and the customer either signs up or doesn't, and, you know, either pays or doesn't. And so they should really care about that outcome to be deep on the details.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Another side of this problem is how do you decide
- 26:18 – 27:48
What to try with AI if you have one hour
- MMMarina Mogilko
what not to automate? And I wanted to ask you about with, you know, your mission in mind, how do you at OpenAI decide what not to build next?
- GBGreg Brockman
I think it's very important that humans remain in control and in charge, right? The, the goals come from people. The point of this technology is to help people, right? To help empower everyone, to help people achieve more of what they want to do. And so I think that that human first, team humanity kind of, of, of vibe is, is very important, very core to our mission, and that's something that really bleeds through into how we think about things. And so when we think about what to build, we always think about how do you put in the right guardrails? How do you build trust? How do you ensure that there's good oversight, monitorability? And that that is something that has been a very core focus of building all that technology for us for really since inception.
- MMMarina Mogilko
For someone who is willing to step up their agent game and they have one hour, where do they start this weekend?
- GBGreg Brockman
I'd say, first of all, sign up for ChatGPT Dots. It's, I, I think, just, like, a really cool new form factor. Again, you can talk, you know, chat a little bit, get some sense of what it does. Um, but connecting it to the appropriate context can really do work, right? It has its own cloud computer, and it can optionally hook to your local computer. And I think that this picture that we've all had of, like, the way the coding agents work is this, like, task-based system that you kind of micromanage that lives on your laptop. You close your laptop, it stops working. Like, clearly that was never the AI that was promised, right? That was never the AI we pictured five years ago. And so I think we now have something that really looks like the AI that we were always picturing. And so again, start with a little task. Like, ask it to go buy
- 27:48 – 30:13
What work with AI could look like in five years
- GBGreg Brockman
something for you or try to ... Like, I, I really like texting mine, right? Just, like, go and, and, and really set up some connectors so that it feels like, okay, I'm- I've got a communication channel to this now. And ask it to do some recurring task, right? Or ask it for to do some research. And the thing that's very interesting is that Dots can really ... It's quite sophisticated, right? It's powered by GPT-6 Astra, so it's actually got basically this incredible brain, like, this smart, incredible, most intelligent model for any of these kinds of assistants powering it, and that means that it makes some connections between things. Like, you ask it a question about, hey, like, what's going on in, in this particular, uh, geography or something, and it will realize that that's something you care about. And then it might proactively then surface if there's a new news report about that, that region, then maybe it will say-
- MMMarina Mogilko
Yeah
- GBGreg Brockman
... "Hey, here's this other thing."
- MMMarina Mogilko
Does some extra thinking for you-
- GBGreg Brockman
That's right
- MMMarina Mogilko
... which I really appreciate. Do you think that's the future of work, or do you think in five years it's gonna be something we can't even imagine now?
- GBGreg Brockman
Well, I think AI is always surprising. So I think that there's going to be somehow that the fundamentals will be we'll have smarter AI that's, like, more accessible and more empowering, all those things, um, but that the way in which you'll utilize it will be surprising relative to what we expect today. So I do think that the form factors will continue to change, and I think that the ... Like, if you think about really we're gonna have this, this AI that's able to solve these unsolved math problems in everyone's hands.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Mm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And so what are people gonna do with that? Like, what are the kinds of breakthroughs that are gonna become possible? And I think about that for medicine, right? For drug discovery. It's gonna be incredible. Material science. We're just going to live in a world where people are gonna be able to solve problems that before required a very small set of specialized experts to be mobilized behind them. Like, you will be able to do that. You will be able to solve these challenges that no one else has ever thought about. And there are gonna be some challenges that no one's ever faced before that you're going to be able to just, like, be the first person to, to solve. And I think that we're gonna do this as this broad community. And so the tools for that, I think there's gonna be so much more collaboration. These AIs are going to, uh, be something that will represent you, um, that you are gonna have an AI that, that is kind of there working for your interests. Companies will have their own AI. So it will be ... I think there's, like, a lot of infrastructure to be built and building this in a way that's trustworthy and that is observable and that really uplifts humanity. Like, that is, I think, very core to what we should collectively be doing.
- MMMarina Mogilko
I think that's an amazing answer, and I think we'll have p- homework to work on our ambition this weekend, not just agents.
- GBGreg Brockman
All right. I love it.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Thank you so much, Greg. That was amazing.
- GBGreg Brockman
Thank you.
- MMMarina Mogilko
Thank you.
- GBGreg Brockman
I appreciate it
Episode duration: 30:14
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