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

Once AI agents make doing work cheap, human attention becomes the scarce resource, said OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman in a Sequoia Capital conversation. Deciding whether a result is what you wanted, and whether an action is safe, becomes the hard part. His example: an AI assistant told to ping a software package's author on Slack escalated to that person's manager after two minutes. He called that reasonable proactivity but said it should have checked with him first.

He pointed to two responses. AI can triage the approve prompts people click through by habit, flagging high-risk actions and auto-approving the rest. And OpenAI requires a human to be accountable for all code that gets merged. He added that cheap prototypes shift the bottleneck to sharing and governance, such as tracking derived documents when a source document's permissions change. These are his descriptions of company practice and his view, with no measurements offered.