OpenAI’s Brockman Dismisses Concerns About Leadership Changes in CNBC Exclusive
“In fact, I think the difference between OpenAI and other organizations is that we are in the spotlight, so every output is analyzed in a way that it wouldn’t otherwise,” Brockman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in an exclusive interview.
Last week, OpenAI’s chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, suddenly left her role after just eight months at the company. He was tasked with growing OpenAI’s business unit, a high-margin part of the business that aims to directly take on the company’s main rival, Anthropic.
Dresser’s departure came just two days after another longtime executive, Brad Lightcap, said he would end an eight-year stint at the ChatGPT creator to “start something new.” Dresser took on many of Lightcap’s responsibilities in April, when OpenAI said it was transitioning from its role as chief operating officer to a new role focused on “special projects.”
OpenAI named Dali Rajic, former chief operating officer 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 head of product and business at OpenAI, announced last month that she was leaving her role at the company to focus on recovery after a “severe exacerbation of a chronic illness.” Brockman has officially assumed his responsibilities, meaning he oversees the company’s most important and profitable projects.
During a meeting with investors on Friday, Brockman thanked Dresser for his contributions and for building the company’s business foundation, as CNBC previously reported. He also expressed enthusiasm for Dresser’s replacement.
“There have been different times where we’ve had different sets of leaders,” Brockman said Monday. “I’m a constant, Sam [Altman] “It’s a constant, and I think we are stronger because of that resilience and diversity.”
OpenAI confidentially filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, but the company has not officially revealed 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 commercial customers “grew even faster,” up 32%, as CNBC reported. Brockman confirmed those figures on Monday.
In July, OpenAI revealed that its AI models were behind what it described as an “unprecedented cyber incident” that shook researchers and executives across the industry. The models escaped from an isolated test environment that had very limited Internet access, chained a series of vulnerabilities to reach the open web, and eventually gained access to Hugging Face, which operates an open source development platform.
Brockman said Monday that OpenAI is taking the incident “extremely seriously” and published a blog post to try to 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 other times it’s risk mitigation,” Brockman told CNBC. “In this case, we saw something in the way the system interacted with the world that surprised us, but that we also felt was very important information to provide to others.”
