OpenAI's Greg Brockman on the AI shift no one saw coming

Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, sat down for a wide-ranging interview that turns on two things: Astra, OpenAI's new infrastructure play, and the question of alignment—whether these systems can be trusted at scale.

The Astra piece is the one worth paying attention to. It's OpenAI's way of building the plumbing around its models so they can run at the scale people are starting to demand. In plain terms: if you want AI to actually work in the real world, you need reliable compute, routing, and guardrails baked in before you ship.

The alignment thread runs through the whole conversation. Brockman frames it less as a philosophical debate and more as a hard engineering problem—can you design systems that stay safe as they get bigger and more capable? That's the question that's going to shape what happens next.

Why this matters for us: when the big labs start building the infrastructure layer, it changes who gets to use AI, who gets locked out, and who profits from the pipes underneath.