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Greg Brockman

Original nameGreg Brockman

American Engineer, Co-Founder and President of OpenAI

Those Who Turned Papers Into What a Billion People Use · Industry & Product Builders

The Co-Founding of OpenAIThe Engineering Realization of the GPT SeriesThe Resignation Protest in the 2023 Board Crisis

Who they are

Greg Brockman (1988– ) is an American engineer, former CTO of the payments company Stripe, who as one of the co-founders took part in founding OpenAI in 2015 and long handled the company’s core engineering system and the execution of product development, widely seen as one of the key engineering leaders turning the research results of the GPT series into products deployable at large scale. During the November 2023 crisis when the OpenAI board suddenly removed Sam Altman as CEO, Brockman then announced his resignation as president in protest, becoming one of the key drivers of the co-signed petition of over ninety percent of the company’s employees demanding the board reconsider, and five days later, with Altman’s reinstatement, Brockman also returned to the company in his former role.

Primary sourcesOpenAI’s founding-team public statement (2015)Brockman’s November 2023 resignation statement

Key stories

In the Crisis, the First to Step Forward and Resign in Protest

After the OpenAI board suddenly removed Altman as CEO in November 2023, Brockman within hours publicly announced his resignation as president in protest, a decisive statement widely seen as one of the key starting points of the chain reaction over the next few days that drove nearly ninety percent of the company’s employees to co-sign a demand for the board to reconsider and at last brought about Altman’s reinstatement.

Relationships

Ally

💬Sam Altman 🎬Mira Murati

Echoes today

Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.

The symbolic significance of the "first to resign in protest"Brockman’s move of announcing his resignation within hours of the board crisis breaking out was thereafter seen as one of the key symbolic events that helped the crisis settle quickly, often cited in corporate-governance case studies.

Appears in

AlphaGo, the Transformer, and the Race to ScaleThe Founding of OpenAI and Musk’s Exit The Generative-AI Explosion and the Industry ContestChatGPT Past a Hundred Million Users in Two Months, a CEO Fired and Reinstated in Five Days

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