OpenAI's Greg Brockman: Why Human Attention Is the New Bottleneck

Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, joins Sequoia partner Alfred Lin at AI Ascent 2026 for a conversation that spans the full OpenAI stack. He explains why the company will never have enough compute, why he believes we're 80% of the way to AGI, and why the agentic coding tools that wrote 20% of your code last December are now writing 80% of it. Also: why human attention is becoming the scarcest resource in AI-augmented work, and what it might be like to one day run an organization of 100,000 agents. 00:00 Introduction 00:49 Compute Hunger Explained 02:13 Scaling Laws Mystery 03:31 New Architectures Ahead 04:42 How Close to AGI 06:46 Startup Playbook for AI 09:24 Inside OpenAI with Codex 11:11 Teams and Governance Shift 14:52 Security and Responsible Deployment 25:33 Science Frontiers and Wrap Up