Greg Brockman

There are people who design the future and people who build it. Greg Brockman is one of the latter, and in the world of AI that distinction matters a great deal. When he co-founded OpenAI in December 2015, he didn't arrive as a grand theorist or an investor with a checkbook: he came as the engineer who was going to make everything actually work. Someone had to stand up the servers, write the pipelines, connect cutting-edge research to the real world. That someone was him.

Before OpenAI, he had already proved what he was made of: he left MIT to join Stripe when the company had just four employees, became CTO in 2013, and helped it grow to 250 people. That experience of building from scratch was perfect for OpenAI, where he led the technical infrastructure behind GPT-3 (June 2020), DALL-E 2, Codex, Whisper, and OpenAI Five, the agent that defeated professional Dota 2 teams in 2019. But the moment that put him on the world stage was the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022: a hundred million users in two months, the fastest-growing application in history.

In 2022 he moved from CTO to President of OpenAI. TIME magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023. In August 2024 he took a sabbatical, his first since co-founding the company nine years earlier, and in November 2024 he returned to OpenAI to lead its scaling and infrastructure efforts. He may not be the most famous name in AI history, but without him, many of the field's most celebrated advances would not have reached the world the way they did.

What impresses me most about Greg Brockman is that he doesn't need the center of the stage. He was educated at Harvard and MIT, won a silver medal at the International Chemistry Olympiad in 2006 (yes, he's one of those), and still chose the role of the person who makes things work. In an industry full of visionaries promising the future, the Brockmans of the world are the ones who deliver it. Every time you open Claude or ask ChatGPT something, there's a little bit of that builder mentality working underneath.