OpenAI president Greg Brockman revealed on the latest episode of the Core Memory podcast that he's taken over the company's overall product and research integration efforts — and he's been in the role for only "a few weeks." CEO Sam Altman says the change has made the company "noticeably happier."
Brockman laid out three product lines. First is the agent platform, which he says is "executing very smoothly" with new releases coming in the next few weeks. Second is "computer work" — he deliberately avoids the term "knowledge work," noting that "nobody thinks of themselves as a knowledge worker." The core idea is to expand Codex from a tool for engineers to something for everyone. Third is "personal AGI," turning ChatGPT into an agent that has user context and can act autonomously. His example: the AI discovers a musician you like is playing a local show and buys you tickets.
The cost of integration is cutting side projects. Brockman confirmed that Sora has been deprioritized for two reasons: its underlying model is on a different branch of the tech tree from the GPT mainline, and creative video expression doesn't fit into the three product lines. He added that the Sora team did "excellent work" and that the technology "will live on in other applications." He also recalled a robotic hand project that was killed in 2018 — trained with the same reinforcement learning algorithm used for gaming, but the tendon cables kept snapping after 20 hours, forcing engineers to come in for late-night repairs. "That team later went on to build GitHub Copilot."