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TBPN · 3 min · Aug 7, 2025
AI agents may help with personal tasks people must coordinate themselves
Greg Brockman
Greg Brockman says flight booking can be hard to automate because preferences matter, while health coordination and other neglected tasks may offer more value.
In this episode
Full analysis- 1:09:03ChatGPT emerged after OpenAI tested whether anyone would pay6 min
- 1:44:43OpenAI prioritizes adoption and compute over near-term cash flow5 min
- 3:08:28Post-training improvements made GPT-5 more reliablePro pick 5 min
- 1:18:07Test-time compute compounds with pretraining and reinforcement learning4 min
- 1:27:06AI agents may help with personal tasks people must coordinate themselves3 min
- 2:19:52Charlie wrote 98% of merged code in one August test4 min
- 2:37:44Agents build context through repeated tool calls3 min
- 3:31:26GPT-5 generated four to ten times more tokens in one test3 min
“there's so much other stuff that happens in your life that is toil or drudgery or that's something that you're not an expert in, you're supposed to be.”
Greg Brockmanat 1:28:46 · TBPN
Takeaways
- Flight booking has a high bar because users weigh many preferences.
- Health coordination can leave patients to manage multiple specialists alone.
- Agents need access to personal information without misusing that trust.
About this segment
Greg Brockman says flight booking can be hard to automate because preferences matter, while health coordination and other neglected tasks may offer more value. He adds that agents need to earn users’ trust.
Co-founder & President, OpenAI
Co-founded OpenAI, where he serves as president; previously Stripe's first chief technology officer from 2013.
John Coogan, Host · Co-host, TBPN
Co-founded Soylent and Lucy; OpenAI bought his show TBPN in April 2026.
Jordi Hays, Host · Co-host, TBPN
Founded Branded Native; co-founded fintech Capital, which Rho bought.
From “OpenAI LIVE: Greg Brockman, Mark Chen & More”, Aug 7, 2025. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
From the transcript TBPN publishes with the episode.
- 1:27:14
He's making books with it. But why have agents broadly come around a little bit slower than than people may have expected? Is it is it is it just that using computers is actually much harder? Computer use is just a really hard challenge or or, you know, I I think going into this year, everybody said this was the year of Are you talking about flight booking or something like that? Flight booking, but, you know, people people were saying 2025 is the year of agents and I would say that it's the year of deep research and and not a lot of these other sort of, like, broader use cases. Sure.
- 1:27:48
Well, 2025 isn't quite over yet. So That's good. That'd be my response. And I Thank you. I'm I'm very much on the I I think that progress in this field, the way that it tends to work is that if something kind of works with the current generation of models, it will be extremely reliable with the next generation of models. Mhmm. Yeah. And I think that where we've been is that deep research is the if you've rewound a year, that was the, we kinda had something working. And then, like, this year, it's been just incredible. And I think that agents, you know, specifically, like, computer use agents are something we've kinda had working. And, again, you know, the year is is not over. I think there's a lot of rapid progress to be made.
- 1:28:27
But I think that maybe part of it too is that the agents that we're about to see, I think, are a little different from maybe what we would have pictured five years ago. Mhmm. Like, I remember having a debate with some friends on do you want a agent that does the flight booking? Because the problem is it's actually a very high bar to beat the flight booking UI because there's so many preferences that are entailed in that. Right? And you really have to know kinda what mood you're in, like, are you okay with, like, taking the extra layover and all these kinds of questions. And that, actually, there's so much other stuff that happens in your life that is toil or drudgery or that's something that you're not an expert in, you're supposed to be.
- 1:29:02
Think about health, that every patient really is the doctor. If you're coordinating across multiple specialists, there's no doctor that helps you with that. Right? That that's really on you. And that there, you actually can have AIs that are just text only, that actually are able to add massive value and then freeze up your time if you want to go book the flights yourself. And so I think that really finding the right problems that have high leverage, that really add value to people, and also thinking about the other side of how to make sure these agents are responsible with the trust that you put in right? That the more that you give an agent access to your email, the more you really have to trust that it's going to sort of do right with whatever your task is and send the right email to the right people and be able to segment your information and all of these kinds of questions. And so I think that there's both a practical how do you get to adoption, but also just like where are the most important leverage points in a person's life.
- 1:30:00
You also missed coding agents because it's been the year of deep research, but I feel like it's also been the year of coding agents. Yep. How is that developing at OpenAI? I've noticed that I'll hit o three Pro and it'll wind up writing a bunch of code for me and I didn't even ask it to. Then you have specific products for coding.