Greg Brockman

Accomplishments

• Co-founded OpenAI, created in 2015, and serves as its president.⁶⁷¹
• Celebrated by the University of North Dakota as a co-creator of ChatGPT.¹
• Served as Stripe's founding engineer and chief technology officer.¹⁸
• Served as OpenAI's chief technology officer in its early years, helping build OpenAI Gym and working on Universe.³⁴
• Built the Dota reinforcement learning environment behind OpenAI Five.⁴⁹
• Testified before the U.S. Senate in 2016 and the U.S. House in 2018 on the state and future of artificial intelligence.³⁹
• Was a finalist for the Intel Science Talent Search while taking university classes as a high school student.¹⁰

Early life and education

Greg Brockman was raised in Thompson, North Dakota, and graduated from Red River High School in Grand Forks. While still in high school, Brockman took classes at the University of North Dakota beginning in sophomore year, studied and conducted research there, competed in math and chemistry competitions, and became a finalist for the Intel Science Talent Search.¹¹⁰

Brockman went on to study mathematics at Harvard and computer science at MIT, having started out at Harvard before transferring.²¹¹

Building Stripe

Brockman joined Stripe as an engineer in 2010 and became the company's founding engineer and chief technology officer, helping to build the payments company from its earliest days. Writing about the role in 2014, Brockman explained realizing that the most important thing to do as CTO was to empower Stripe's engineers to make big changes and improvements.⁸¹³

Co-founding OpenAI

Brockman left Stripe to work on AI, drawn to the goal of moving humanity to safe human-level AI, a problem Brockman could imagine happily working on for the rest of a lifetime. Brockman helped start OpenAI, which was created in 2015, and Sam Altman has since described Brockman to the Senate as a co-founder.¹¹⁷⁶

As OpenAI's co-founder and chief technology officer, Brockman testified on November 30, 2016, at the Senate Commerce subcommittee hearing "The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence", which Brockman called an important first opportunity for senators to understand AI. Brockman described OpenAI's mission to build safe, advanced AI technology and ensure that its benefits are distributed to everyone, and urged the United States to compete on applications while cooperating on open, basic research.³

From OpenAI's first day, Brockman's software skills were always in demand. Brockman helped build OpenAI Gym, then was called to work on Universe, and later took on turning the game Dota into a reinforcement learning environment, breaking out of the game's Lua sandbox and incrementally exporting the whole game state so that machine learning work could begin.⁴

From engineer to machine learning practitioner

In June 2018, Brockman told the House Science, Space, and Technology subcommittees about OpenAI Five, a system that had reached the semi-professional level at Dota, a ten-player team strategy video game that is one of the most complex games played by humans.⁹

In 2019, Brockman wrote about completing a nine-month transition to becoming a machine learning practitioner, explaining that the biggest hurdle was getting comfortable being a beginner again. In 2020, Brockman worked on serving OpenAI's models to customers quickly, and later on making it possible for a small team to manage a massive system.⁴¹²

Vision and recent work

Brockman has long championed OpenAI's mission. In 2019, Brockman co-wrote a post explaining that OpenAI aims to capture the benefits of artificial general intelligence while mitigating its risks and to make sure those benefits accrue to all of humanity. OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, and in September 2023 Brockman, by then co-founder and president of OpenAI, returned to the University of North Dakota to share that journey with the campus.^1314110

In "The Defender's Window" (August 2026), Brockman argued that AI will make it much easier for defenders to find, prioritize, and fix security flaws, and may shift the economics of cybersecurity in ways that fundamentally advantage defenders, offering practical steps for organizations to bring AI into their security work.¹⁵

Timeline

1. 2010Brockman joined Stripe as an engineer.⁸
2. Oct 27, 2014Brockman wrote about defining the chief technology officer role at Stripe.⁸
3. 2015OpenAI was created, with Brockman as a co-founder.⁷⁶
4. May 3, 2016Brockman published "My path to OpenAI".¹¹
5. Nov 30, 2016Brockman testified at the Senate hearing "The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence".³
6. Jun 26, 2018Brockman testified before House Science subcommittees, describing OpenAI Five.⁹²
7. Mar 11, 2019Brockman co-wrote "The OpenAI Mission".¹³
8. Jul 30, 2019Brockman described becoming a machine learning practitioner.⁴
9. 2020Brockman worked on serving OpenAI's models to customers.¹²
10. Apr 11, 2022Brockman published "It's time to become an ML engineer".¹²
11. Nov 30, 2022OpenAI launched ChatGPT.¹⁴
12. Sep 26, 2023Brockman spoke about a career in AI at the University of North Dakota.¹⁰
13. Aug 16, 2026Brockman published "The Defender's Window" on AI and cybersecurity.¹⁵

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, OpenAI³²
• Founding engineer and Chief Technology Officer, Stripe (2010 –)⁸¹³

Where they work

• OpenAI 63 people in the wiki

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