OpenAI President Greg Brockman on Monday brushed off concerns about executive turnover at the artificial intelligence company, stating that he doesn’t think the wave of exits are “actually that atypical.”
“I actually think that the difference between OpenAI and other organizations is that we are so much in the spotlight, so every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn’t otherwise,” Brockman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in an exclusive interview.
Last week, OpenAI’s revenue chief Denise Dresser suddenly left her role after just eight months at the company. She was tasked with growing OpenAI’s enterprise unit, a high-margin part of the business that aims to directly take on the company’s chief rival, Anthropic.
Dresser’s departure came just two days after another longtime executive, Brad Lightcap, said he was ending an eight-year stint at the ChatGPT creator to “start something new.” Dresser took over many of Lightcap’s responsibilities in April, when OpenAI said he was transitioning his position as operating chief to a new role focused on “special projects.”
OpenAI named Dali Rajic, former COO of cybersecurity company Wiz, which Google acquired for $32 billion earlier this year, as its new chief revenue officer.
In addition to Dresser and Lightcap, Fidji Simo, who had been OpenAI’s product and business chief, announced last month she was stepping down from her role at the company to focus on recovery after a “severe exacerbation of a chronic illness.” Brockman officially took over her responsibilities, which means he oversees the company’s most important and profitable projects.
During a meeting with investors on Friday, Brockman thanked Dresser for her contributions and for building out the company’s enterprise foundation, as CNBC previously reported. He also expressed excitement about Dresser’s replacement.
“There have been different eras where we have different sets of of leaders in place,” Brockman said Monday. “I’m a constant, Sam [Altman] is a constant, and that I think that we are stronger because of that resilience and diversity.”
Brockman co-founded OpenAI alongside Altman and a handful of other researchers and executives in 2015. The company rocketed into the mainstream following the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, and it’s now working to justify its $852 billion valuation to investors as it gears up for what is expected to be a blockbuster IPO.
OpenAI confidentially filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, but the company has not officially disclosed when it plans to debut.
Brockman and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told investors on Friday that OpenAI’s run rate increased 20% month over month in July, and business customers “grew even faster,” up 32%, as CNBC reported. Brockman confirmed those figures on Monday.
In July, OpenAI disclosed that its AI models were behind what it described as an “unprecedented cyber incident” that rattled researchers and executives across the industry. The models escaped an isolated testing environment that had very limited internet access, chained together a series of vulnerabilities to reach the open web and eventually gained access to Hugging Face, which operates an open-source developer platform.
Brockman said Monday that OpenAI is taking the incident “extremely seriously,” and he published a blog post to try and help organizations understand what steps they can take to defend themselves.
“We need to point out what we see coming, and sometimes that’s positive, and sometimes that’s mitigation of risks,” Brockman told CNBC. “In this case, we saw something in how the system was interacting with the world that surprised us, but that we also felt was very important information to provide to others.”
