Greg Brockman Says OpenAI’s Tech Outpaced Human Chip Designers

OpenAI’s models did what chip engineers could do — only much faster, said OpenAI president Greg Brockman.

Brockman said on an episode of “The OpenAI Podcast” published Monday that the company’s models helped uncover chip design optimizations that would have taken human designers weeks to identify.

“We’ve been able to apply our own models to designing this chip,” Brockman said, referring to OpenAI’s new custom silicon developed in partnership with Broadcom.

“You take components that humans have already optimized and just pour compute into it, and the model comes up with its own optimizations,” he added.

Brockman said the AI-assisted process led to “massive area reductions” on the chip — meaning smaller, more efficient hardware — and shaved weeks off the production schedule.

“I don’t think any of the optimizations that we have are ones that human designers couldn’t have come up with,” he said.

“Our experts take a look at it later, and say, ‘Yeah, this was on my list,’ but it was like, 20 things that would’ve taken them another month to get to,” he added.

Brockman said OpenAI has been building that expertise in-house to better understand the chip-design process.

His comments came as OpenAI announced a new partnership with Broadcom to co-design custom silicon and build out AI infrastructure and computing power.

The companies said on Monday that they plan to roll out 10 gigawatts worth of custom chips, which Broadcom would deploy by the second half of 2026 and finish in 2029. They will be spread across OpenAI’s facilities and partner data centers.

“Developing our own accelerators adds to the broader ecosystem of partners all building the capacity required to push the frontier of AI to provide benefits to all humanity,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in Monday’s statement.

Brockman and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.