@SamAltman and @GregBrockman sat down together for the first time — possibly ever — on @Core Memory with @Ashlee Vance and @Kylie Robison. 90 minutes. No filter. The full story. Here's what actually matters: The Elon story — finally told For years, the OpenAI-Elon split has been told from one side. Now Greg tells it directly. In the early days, all the founders agreed: the only path forward for OpenAI was a for-profit structure. Elon was at the table. They were close to a deal. Then the ask came. Majority equity. CEO title. Absolute control. Permanent absolute control — even with promises to dilute down later. And the founders had to ask themselves one question: Do we actually believe our mission? The mission is that AGI should benefit everyone — not be controlled by one person. No matter who that person is. That was the breaking point. That was the answer. And that is why the split happened. "We've never told that story. Now we will." — Greg Brockman What OpenAI is actually building right now Greg laid out the three-part focus with unusual clarity: 1. Agent platform — the number one priority. Models have shifted from being the product to being part of the product. There's now a "fat layer" of software: skills, connectors, memory, computer use — that Greg calls "building the body to go with the brain." 2. Codex for everyone — computer work, not just for software engineers. The vision: most of what you do chained to a screen, hunched over a keyboard — agents do that. You manage the 20% that requires human judgment. 3. Personal AGI — an AI that knows you, has your context, acts on your behalf, and has built enough trust to make decisions for you. The example: it knows your favorite artist is in town, finds cheap tickets, and buys them. Without asking. Sora got cut. Not because the team isn't great, but because it's a different branch of the tech tree, separate from the core GPT architecture, and doesn't fit the current product thesis. The team will find other applications. The inequality problem Sam actually admitted This is the part most people will skip. Don't. Sam laid out three possible futures clearly: World 1: The floor rises dramatically. Everyone gets meaningfully richer. But the people with compute, capital, and agent fluency compound their advantages — and you get a handful of trillionaires. World 2: Less total prosperity, but more equality. Sam's honest take: Intellectually, most people would choose World 1. Emotionally, a lot of people don't, and he gets why. The unlock, in his view: make compute cheap and accessible to everyone. Because AI without compute access is just a different kind of inequality. The thing that broke me open Greg described what a "personal AGI" moment looks like — an AI that knows your work, your life, your preferences, your goals, and acts as your agent across all of it. Then Ashlee said something quietly devastating: "I was at dinner with you and listening to what you were doing with agents. And even though I feel like I'm doing interesting things — I was just like, oh my god. There are just going to be super people running around." That word. Super people. Not superintelligence. Super people. Humans who know how to run agents at scale, stack compute, move faster than everyone around them. The people who figure this out in the next 24 months will compound in ways that are genuinely hard to reverse. The question isn't whether AI is coming. The question is whether you're going to be someone who uses it, or someone it happens to. One more thing After everything — the Sam firing drama, the lawsuits, the Elon saga, the press cycles — Greg said this about Sam: "The degree of resilience that is represented by Sam is extreme. And very underappreciated." The night before a credible threat on his life, Sam was at a dinner with colleagues talking about the next phase. And the day after, he was back — pushing on the mission. Whatever you think about OpenAI, that detail is worth sitting with. 🎙️ Full episode: Core Memory with Ashlee Vance & Kylie Robison Guests: Sam Altman · Greg Brockman · OpenAI buff.ly/6FjtQgW