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Greg Brockman On OpenAI’s Plan To Win: Compute Rules All
Appearing at the Big Technology AI Summit Thursday, OpenAI president Greg Brockman indicated that winning the compute race could be the key to winning more broadly.
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If AI model capabilities continue to improve fast — and relatively in sync across frontier labs — the lab with the most compute will win in the end, OpenAI president Greg Brockman suggested at the Big Technology AI Summit on Thursday.
“There just is not going to be enough compute in the world to satisfy all the demand,” Brockman said. “Right now, we’re talking about compute constraints and the number of people using these agents is — the order of 10 million, 20 million maybe — we’re not at planet scale.”
“ChatGPT is like a billion users,” Brockman continued, “but we haven’t brought the agentic power there yet, so you’re just looking at these factors and the depth of usage is also tiny compared to where we’re going.”
Brockman’s view explains why OpenAI has been investing so heavily in its datacenter buildout. The company is engaged in a historic investment in compute. It raised $122 billion earlier this year, and much of it will go towards building the infrastructure needed to serve these use cases. Competitors have chided the company for its spending — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called it “YOLOing” — but for Brockman, the buildout is a core element of how OpenAI plans to win over time.
At the summit, Brockman also outlined OpenAI’s vision for an AI product experience where the bots take action for you, noting platforms like Codex are catching on even with people doing non-software work. The way he sees it, the right form factor and the right capabilities have to match up to get the most out of AI models, adding that the best way to interact with a computer might be to talk with it verbally instead of typing everything.
“The beautiful thing about AI is it’s really about bringing the machine closer to the human,” Brockman said. “Rather than us having to contort ourselves to find files, folders, and all these details that somehow are not natural, that are more about how the machine operates rather than how we operate.”
Brockman also downplayed speculation of a potential price war with competitors, saying only that pricing will keep going down in the long term even without expecting a “massive shift in the short term.” He thinks frontier intelligence will always remain the most expensive tier.
“The most important thing that is happening right now is the usage of AI in the economy to really transform the economy and to uplift everyone,” Brockman said. “And so I think that is something I’m really focused on. And the more that people are trying to make that happen, I think that that’s better for everyone.”
Other highlights from yesterday’s AI Summit below…
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