Greg Brockman on the week two OpenAI AI models went rogue

When I heard the AI had escaped, I was out on a Wyoming river. 

Yes, I mysteriously had cell service while fly fishing with my family on the Salt River (among the only rivers in the world to flow north). I promise: I wasn’t intentionally checking Slack—it was a pure, predictable reflex, the kind you try to curb on vacation. And there it was: two OpenAI models escaped their testing environment, and breached open source AI company Hugging Face’s systems.

While I was (quite literally) out fishing, my colleague Emily Forlini talked to Greg Brockman, OpenAI cofounder and president, about the attack. Brockman told her that “This incident, to some extent, is indicative of just the moment that we’re in, right?” He added that models have been getting so good that “sometimes it’s hard to lose track of any one dimension that they’re actually very capable at.”

The incident was evocative and, frankly, nightmare fodder for our society’s worst fears about AI. The timing here is also notable, given the stakes: OpenAI could be set to go public as soon as this year (my money is on 2027, personally). OpenAI’s prospective IPO matters, I’d argue, for everyone. It will be—maybe even more so than an Anthropic IPO—the quintessential test of the AI bubble. OpenAI’s massive consumer reach, reportedly dicey margins, and narrative importance in the AI boom make it a perfect prism through which investors of all kinds will ask the question: Is this all worth it?

So, I was also intrigued by what Brockman had to say to Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell in their one-on-one about what a sustainable business model in AI can actually look like. 

“There are two parts to that,” Brockman said. “One is, let’s suppose model capabilities were frozen today: what is the business? I think........

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