Top all-time · #1651
Greg Brockman
Personal blog · blog.gregbrockman.comaicareerstartups
Greg Brockman's personal blog at blog.gregbrockman.com covers ai, career and startups. Since 2011, 46 different Hacker News readers have linked it 60 times, most often “How I Became a Machine Learning Practitioner”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Greg Brockman | Svbtle
Most-linked posts?
- How I Became a Machine Learning Practitioner14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2019-07-30
- #define CTO6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2014-10-28
- The OpenAI Mission4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-03-11
- It's time to become an ML engineer (2022)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-04-11
- #define CTO OpenAI3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-01-13
- #define CTO3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-10-28
- My path to OpenAI2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-05-03
- High Availability with MongoDB at Stripe2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-05-07
- Recurse Center2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-05-19
What Hacker News says?
Thanks for your list! I tried the first link but it is giving a 404. I looked it up in his blog and found this: https://blog.gregbrockman.com/figuring-out-the-cto-role-at-s... Could you please confirm if this is the same one?
Comment linking /figuring-out-the-cto-role-at-stripe
on “Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?”Submitted #define CTO as a story · 650 points
HN discussionHm, what error were you seeing? Assuming it was a 404: the setup is a bit weird since I changed the slug early on and added a Cloudflare-level rewrite to keep the old one working, but the Cloudflare rule was doing an exact string match. So if you went to something like " https://blog.gregbrockman.com/define-cto?" , it would 404, while " https://blog.gregbrockman.com/define-cto" worked fine. Just updated the rule to…
Comment linking /define-cto%22
on “#define CTO”Submitted Leaving Stripe as a story · 297 points
HN discussionI was wondering the same thing. Found this article that sums it up pretty nicely. https://blog.gregbrockman.com/my-path-to-openai
Comment linking /my-path-to-openai
on “Greg”Submitted How I Became a Machine Learning Practitioner as a story · 290 points
HN discussiongdb wrote a brilliant post about his experience that you should definitely read: https://blog.gregbrockman.com/figuring-out-the-cto-role-at-s...
Comment linking /figuring-out-the-cto-role-at-stripe
on “Ask HN: I don't enjoy being a CTO. Now what?”Submitted #define CTO OpenAI as a story · 253 points
HN discussionI think the linked https://blog.gregbrockman.com/figuring-out-the-cto-role-at-s... is much more interesting, it gives more actionable detail and advice. As Brockman says, you need a very strong VP Eng to make this possible. It’s an important milestone for the technical founder(s) to decide if they are going to hang up their spurs and become a manager/leader, or keep doing the technical work. (A common failure mode i…
Comment linking /figuring-out-the-cto-role-at-stripe
on “Why I code as a CTO”Submitted My path to OpenAI as a story · 233 points
HN discussionHe’s putting in crazy hours because he doesn’t have a formal background in ML—his background is software engineering. He talks about how learning ML made him feel like a beginner again on his blog (which was a way for him attract talent willing to learn ML to OpenAI) https://blog.gregbrockman.com/its-time-to-become-an-ml-engin...
Comment linking /its-time-to-become-an-ml-engineer
on “OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO”Submitted Securing Stripe's Capture the Flag as a story · 135 points
HN discussionAs far as I can disentangle from [1], OpenAI posits only moderate superhuman performance. The profit would come from a variant where OpenAI subsumes much but not all of the economy and does not bring things to post-scarcity. The nonprofit would take ownership of almost all of the generated wealth, but the investments would still have value since the traditional ownership structure might be left intact. I don't buy t…
Comment linking /the-openai-mission
on “OpenAI LP”Submitted Becoming CTO at OpenAI (2017) as a story · 80 points
HN discussion> (AGI) — which we define as automated systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work — [0] I don't doubt that OpenAI will be doing absolute first class AI research (they are already doing this). It's just that I don't really find this definition of 'GI' compelling, and 'Artificial' really doesn't mean much--just because you didn't find it in a meadow somewhere doesn't mean it doesn't work. So 'A'…
Comment linking /the-openai-mission
on “OpenAI LP”Submitted It's time to become an ML engineer (2022) as a story · 38 points
HN discussion(I work at OpenAI.) I think this tweet from one of our employees sums it up well: https://twitter.com/Miles_Brundage/status/110519043405200588... Why are we making this move? Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, and our primary approach to doing this is to actually try building safe AGI. We need to raise billions of dollars to do this, and needed a structure like OpenAI LP to attract that kind of i…
Comment linking /the-openai-mission
on “OpenAI LP”Submitted Greg Brockman: How I became a machine learning practitioner (2019) as a story · 7 points
HN discussionOur mission is articulated here and does not change: https://openai.com/charter/ . As we say in the Charter, our primary means of accomplishing the mission is to build safe AGI ourselves. That means raising billions of dollars, without which the Nonprofit will fail at its mission. That's a huge amount of money and not something we could raise without changing structure. Regardless of structure, it's worth humanity m…
Comment linking /the-openai-mission
on “OpenAI LP”Submitted Static analysis in Ruby as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThe Charter was designed to capture our values, as we thought about how we'd create a structure that allows us to raise more money while staying true to our mission. Some companies to compare with: - Stripe Series A was $100M post-money ( https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/stripe-series-a--a3... Series E was $22.5B post-money ( https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/stripe-series-e--d0... ) — over a 200x ret…
Comment linking /the-openai-mission
on “OpenAI LP”Submitted High Availability with MongoDB at Stripe as a story · 6 points
HN discussionFor people who want to dive into Deep Learning, I highly recommend checking these resources: 1. Fast.ai: https://www.fast.ai/ 2. Open AI Spinning Up: https://spinningup.openai.com/en/latest/index.html Read: 1. A Google Brain engineer’s guide to entering AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18421422 2. How I became a machine learning practitioner https://blog.gregbrockman.com/how-i-became-a-machine-learnin...
Comment linking /how-i-became-a-machine-learning-practitioner
on “How to Start with Machine Learning”Submitted It’s time to become an ML engineer as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHe's written a post about how he defined CTO role at Stripe ( http://blog.gregbrockman.com/figuring-out-the-cto-role-at-st... ). I imagine he'll approaching the role similarly.
Comment linking /figuring-out-the-cto-role-at-stripe
on “My path to OpenAI”Submitted Greg Brockman Is Joining the Stellar Board as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI'm working in the field (and winning contests) without a bachelor. As was said here [0] "Overall, machine learning systems can be thought of as a machine learning core — usually an advanced algorithm which requires a few chapters from Ian’s book to understand — surrounded by a huge amount of software engineering." [0] https://blog.gregbrockman.com/define-cto-openai So that's what I mostly do - write code, try new i…
Comment linking /define-cto-openai
on “Ask HN: Is there really a market for deep learning skills without a Ph.D?”Submitted It’s time to become an ML engineer as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSo this might not work for you, but I will tell you my path anyway. 1. Was one of the first members of the #ai slack channel inviting some people I had in person conversations about AI with. 2. I posted _a lot_ in there. Stuff about regulatory updates, people using co-pilot, cool github repos, little demo projects I was working on. 3. Now this was pure luck and probably the best thing to push me over the boundary, t…
Comment linking /how-i-became-a-machine-learning-practitioner
on “Stanford A.I. Courses”Submitted The OpenAI Mission as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
