OpenAI's co-founders bet everything on agents, personal AGI and endless compute, while conceding AI could worsen inequality.
Compute is a profit center, not a costAltman says he feels enabled rather than constrained by the business, and Brockman describes it simply: rent or buy compute, resell at a margin, demand unlimited.
Sora cut so agents could get the focusBrockman names Sora as the most obvious thing deprioritized because its models and use case are not unified with the core GPT series.
Absolute control was the breaking point with ElonBrockman says Sam, Ilya, Greg and Elon all agreed on the for-profit path, but not on one person having absolute control over OpenAI.
Executive SummaryAI
On the Core Memory podcast, Ashley Vance and Kylie Robison host Sam Altman and Greg Brockman together, which the hosts believe is the first time the two OpenAI co-founders have done a podcast jointly.
Brockman dates the first moment of OpenAI to a dinner in July of 2015 and the drive back to the city with Altman, and says they still work through roughly five short calls a day, with Altman crediting Brockman for forcing focus and for holding the line on iterative deployment over the traditional safety frame.
Altman argues that before ChatGPT nobody cared despite blog posts, video game wins and a robot hand solving a Rubik's Cube, and that ChatGPT and then coding models were the only two moments the world actually updated, with a new image model and writing-focused models coming soon.
Pressed on who benefits, Altman sketches three futures — one where the floor rises tenfold and inequality still worsens with maybe ten trillionaires, one with less prosperity and less inequality — and concludes everyone should want much more compute and the cheapest possible access, while Brockman points to the OpenAI Foundation holding 25% to 30% of equity, more than $150 billion.
Brockman explains the recent consolidation: three priorities — an agentic platform, Codex for everyone doing computer work, and personal AGI for ChatGPT's billion users — with Sora deprioritized as a different branch of the tech tree, while Altman says the Elon lawsuit is a chance to finally tell the story that a demand for absolute control was the breaking point.
Key Quote
“We are building something that contorts the machine to you.”
— Greg Brockman
Key Quote
“But really, truly, no one cared.”
— Sam Altman
Key Quote
“It's a strange phrasing because I don't feel constrained by the business.”