There is a particular kind of symmetry in the property that just hit the San Francisco market. A three-bedroom, two-bathroom penthouse — 1,800 square feet, two stories, with original ceiling beams and a roof deck — listed at roughly $1.55 million. Renovated in 2015. Loft-like. Otherwise unremarkable, except for one detail: it is the apartment where ChatGPT got its start.
In January 2016, Greg Brockman, then a co-founder and president of OpenAI, gathered a small team in his rented San Francisco apartment to begin work on what would become the most consequential AI product of the past decade. With no office and no funding, the founding team — including current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman — pulled in whiteboards, collected office supplies, and started building. Brockman documented the period in a 2017 blog post, recalling the early days of pulling whiteboards into his loft-like unit and supporting his teammates.
The team outgrew the apartment quickly and moved to a proper office. Brockman's apartment, until now a rental, is on the market for the first time since 2013.
