While it isn’t uncommon for spouses and partners to turn up in the offices of start-ups, sources who’ve spent time with the Brockmans noted that by the late 2010s Anna was unusually engaged in his work life, having left her own job at the venture capital firm Basis Set Ventures. While, per The Information, Anna has never been formally employed at OpenAI, over the years she has appeared in live product demos; accompanied executives on trips, like one to South Korea to meet with local start-ups; and even been spotted at high-level meetings at the OpenAI office.
When OpenAI’s top executives were appointed drivers and private security, Anna would sometimes be spotted in the car with Greg, taking him to work, according to former colleagues.
As the money piled up, the relationships between the company’s early team—including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Jakub Pachocki, Mira Murati, and Dario and Daniela Amodei—began to fray. While the imaginations of many of their Bay Area peers ran wild with sci-fi visions of uploaded consciousness and unfathomable abundance, and AI doomsayers warned of extinction events, the Brockmans’ hopes for an AI future felt relatively pedestrian.
Greg was firmly in the pro-commercialization camp, according to OpenAI researchers who’ve worked with him, believing that above all, AI can empower individuals to transform their own lives. Anna, meanwhile, is driven by the “idea that AI for all is gonna take all these major social problems, like the extreme cost of health care and education [and] extreme inequality in access…and it’s gonna democratize all of it,” according to Jaswa.
And to do that, the Brockmans understood that AI leaders needed to win over the policymakers that, in their view, could stand in the way of AGI.
Following the release of ChatGPT in 2022, OpenAI’s founding team found themselves on the other side of overnight fame—at least in the insular tech bubble of the Bay Area. While some of the more socially awkward researchers chafed at the attention, Greg—who’d been promoted to president of the company—and Anna have seemed to bask in it.