OpenAI President Greg Brockman on Monday dismissed concerns about executive changes at artificial intelligence companies, saying he doesn’t think the wave of exits is “actually all that unusual.”
“Really, I think the difference between OpenAI and other organizations is that because we’re in the spotlight, every departure is scrutinized differently than other organizations,” Brockman said in an exclusive interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Last week, OpenAI’s head of revenue Dennis Dresser abruptly left his position after just eight months at the company. She was tasked with growing OpenAI’s enterprise division. The division is a high-margin part of the business aimed at directly competing with the company’s biggest rival, Anthropic.
Dresser’s departure comes just two days after fellow longtime executive Brad Lightcap said he was ending his eight-year tenure as ChatGPT developer to “start something new.” Dresser took over many of LightCap’s responsibilities in April, and OpenAI announced that Dresser would transition from his position as executive director to a new role focused on “special projects.”
OpenAI has named Dali Razik, the 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, OpenAI’s former product and business director, Fiji Simo, also announced last month that he was stepping down from his role at the company to focus on recovering from a “severe exacerbation of a chronic illness.” Brockman will officially take over her responsibilities, meaning she will oversee the company’s most important and profitable projects.
As previously reported by CNBC, during a meeting with investors on Friday, Brockman thanked Dresser for his contributions and for building the company’s corporate foundation. He also expressed excitement about Dresser’s replacement.
“We’ve had different leaders in place at different times,” Brockman said Monday. “I’m a constant, Sam (Altman) is a constant, and I think we’re stronger because of that resiliency and diversity.”
Brockman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman and a handful of other researchers and executives. The company rocketed into the mainstream after launching its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, and is now working to justify its $852 billion valuation to investors in what is expected to be a major IPO.
OpenAI confidentially filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, but the company has not officially disclosed when it plans to debut.
As reported by CNBC, Brockman and OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told investors on Friday that OpenAI’s utilization increased 20% month-over-month in July, and enterprise customers “grew even faster” at 32%. Brockman confirmed those numbers on Monday.
In July, OpenAI revealed that its AI model was behind what it called an “unprecedented cyber incident” that rattled researchers and executives across the industry. The model escaped from an isolated testing environment with very limited access to the internet and chained together a series of vulnerabilities to reach the open web, ultimately gaining access to Hugging Face, an open source developer platform.
Brockman said Monday that OpenAI takes the incident “very seriously” and published a blog post to help organizations understand what steps they can take to protect themselves.
“You have to point out what’s going to happen, and sometimes that’s a positive, sometimes it’s risk mitigation,” Brockman told CNBC. “In this case, we saw something in how the system interacted with the world that surprised us, but we also felt it was very important information to provide to others.”
