OpenAI's President Says: The Best Product Is No Product
- OpenAI President Greg Brockman sat down for an interview at the Big Technology AI Summit in San Francisco: ChatGPT is about to cross 1 billion users, the company is pushing toward an IPO at a trillion-dollar valuation, and it just closed the largest venture round in history at $122 billion.
- His core thesis is that "the interface will dissolve": in the future, users won't need apps or products — they'll talk directly to a persistent AGI entity, give it a goal, and let it go act.
- Codex has gone from a coding tool to a general-purpose Agent framework; non-technical teams like PR and operations are using it heavily, and internal adoption is nearing Slack-level.
- He asserts scaling laws still hold today — every time a model seems to "hit a wall," digging in reveals an engineering bug; OpenAI's compute strategy is "buy it all," and it has been designing its own chips for years.
- OpenAI is developing multiple hardware devices and building an end-to-end, bidirectional voice model aimed at replacing "turn-taking," so conversations can be interrupted at any time, just like with a real person.
11 years in: how big is OpenAI now
OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman recently sat for a closing interview with Alex Kantrowitz at the Big Technology AI Summit (Commonwealth Club) in San Francisco — their fourth conversation together, covering the Agent era, the shape of interfaces, the compute race, and the product roadmap.
In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI with Elon Musk and Sam Altman to pursue AGI. Eleven years later, the company may well go public within the next year at a trillion-dollar valuation. This interview carries weight because the person speaking stands at the top of that scale, talking about what the product becomes next.
Why it matters: this is OpenAI's president publicly confirming, for the first time, that the company is developing multiple hardware devices; internally, Codex-driven Agent use has reached Slack-level adoption; the context window has grown from 2K tokens in 2022 to 5 to 12 million tokens today; and 230 million people use ChatGPT every week to ask health questions.
He says: the best product is no product
The host restates a common framing: OpenAI is merging Codex, the browser, and ChatGPT into a single "super app," where everything starts from one prompt and the technology then reaches into your browser or computer to get it done. Brockman agrees with that lens, but wants to pull the camera back further.
He says what they're really building is AGI. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it had no memory, wasn't connected to any tools, and had no context — that kind of conversational intelligence was only a small slice of what people need to get things done. Where OpenAI is heading is an AI that genuinely thinks ahead for you: you give it a goal, and it's constantly thinking about "what can I do for you today," tackling both extremely hard problems and small chores — you wake up to a sorted inbox, or get help working through a medical plan back and forth.
His conclusion: you barely want an "interface," you don't want a "product." What you want is to talk to a persistent entity the way you'd talk to another person, and have it help you reach your goal. The long-term direction is simplification and unification — a system where you don't have to click so many buttons, flip so many switches, or juggle so many modes. The interface will dissolve, bit by bit.