OpenAI's Greg Brockman emerges as day-to-day leader

OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT chatbot, is undergoing a major internal shake-up. In recent months, several high-ranking executives have left the company — some within just days of each other. This includes the heads of product, marketing, revenue, and other key roles.

As these leaders depart, one person is picking up the pieces: Greg Brockman, a cofounder who has been at OpenAI since its beginning. Unlike CEO Sam Altman, who is focusing on long-term strategy and preparing the company for an initial public offering (IPO — when a private company sells shares to the public and becomes tradeable on stock markets), Brockman is now running day-to-day operations. He oversees product development, enterprise clients, consumer products like ChatGPT, and the company's core infrastructure.

Brockman's rise matters because it signals how OpenAI plans to compete in the coming years. The company is fighting hard against rival Anthropic, which has been winning more enterprise contracts. OpenAI is preparing to go public, which means pleasing investors while staying innovative. Brockman's engineering background — he dropped out of MIT to join payment company Stripe before cofounding OpenAI — makes him well-suited to juggle these competing demands. However, he now faces enormous pressure: balancing expensive research with the need to turn profits, managing different business units with conflicting resource needs, and doing all this while OpenAI aims to launch AI-powered hardware and compete with giants like Google and Apple.