
OpenAI Co-Founder: AI Goes Parabolic! Here's What's Next | Greg Brockman
From The Knowledge Project by Shane Parrish
April 22, 2026 · 1h 13m
About this episode
Greg Brockman discusses the future of AI and the events surrounding Sam Altman's firing from OpenAI.
The AI race, the future of AGI, and the inside story of OpenAI. Greg Brockman is the co-founder of OpenAI. This is the most detailed first-person account he has given of the 72 hours after Sam Altman was fired, how OpenAI started, and the future. Greg explains how the original Napa offsite produced the three-step technical plan OpenAI has followed for a decade and the real reason OpenAI had to abandon its pure nonprofit structure. He then walks through the 72 hours after Sam Altman was fired: where he was when he got the board call, why he quit the same day, how the "Phoenix" backup company was designed at Sam's house the next morning, and the moment Ilya Sutskever's tweet changed everything. From there, the conversation turns forward: whether we're in a global AI race, how much of OpenAI's own code is now written by AI ("it's hard to know what percent is not"), why OpenAI stopped showing reasoning traces, what a compute-constrained world means for who gets access to AGI, and Greg's answer to the question everyone is really asking: What happens to your job? ----- Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:49 Meeting Sam Altman and Starting OpenAI 00:02:40 Building the Founding Team…
People in this episode
Host: Shane Parrish
Guest: Greg Brockman
Topics covered
- AI race
- future of AGI
- OpenAI history
- Sam Altman
- nonprofit structure
- job impact of AI
Keywords
- OpenAI
- AGI
- AI race
- Sam Altman
- Greg Brockman
- DeepMind
- nonprofit
- Dota 2
- Ilya Sutskever
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: OpenAI, DeepMind
Products: Dota 2
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