Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin Greg Brockman (Part 1)
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Feb 25, 2026 
Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI who led engineering and product strategy. He talks about personal uses of ChatGPT, how new models and infrastructure drive progress, the board crisis that reshaped the company, fundraising and Microsoft’s compute support, scaling teams and culture, and surprising breakthroughs from language models to biology.
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Leaving Everything For The Mission
- After hearing the board call, Greg told his wife they should assume their equity might go to zero, and she agreed to leave because they believed in the mission.
- That personal decision led to him calling Sam and deciding to start a new company together the same day.
Code Is A Domain Where Models Improved Dramatically
- Models excelled unexpectedly at end-to-end software development including debugging and testing, with rapid quality jumps between minor releases.
- Brockman points to the leap between model versions (e.g., 5.1 to 5.2) as night-and-day for coding capability.
Lead From The Trenches By Staying Technical
- Leaders should stay hands-on to know the right technical decisions; Greg continues coding to lead from the trenches.
- He credits this approach for making product choices like the API and understanding micro architecture trade-offs.