The OpenAI Coder Who Spun Tech On its Head
Fixer. Feather ruffler. Coder in chief. OpenAI President Greg Brockman wears a lot of hats at the buzzy startup. But his toughest job may be keeping its bigger rivals at bay after jolting them awake with the breakout success of ChatGPT.
Greg Brockman needed a win.
In 2017, Brockman—then chief technology officer of OpenAI, a 50-person nonprofit at the time—was worried about getting left in the dust by bigger rivals like DeepMind, an AI lab owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet. He also was concerned that OpenAI might fall into the trap that had ensnared other artificial intelligence labs, where researchers fiddled around with projects that were never put into practice.
So Brockman spearheaded a plan to get OpenAI’s researchers and engineers working harmoniously together to create software that could play Dota 2, a complex online battle game. Although both groups had similar duties—researchers focused on training new models, while engineers built software to make those models work—there had been tensions between the two on other projects at OpenAI, a common dynamic inside tech companies, former OpenAI employees said. After months of all-nighters, their software eventually aced the game, and by early 2019 it beat the world’s best human Dota 2 players in thousands of games, generating buzz among gamers and AI researchers.