OpenAI president: “The computer should be there to empower you.” So stop retooling software for AI agents
The New Stack Meredith Shubel
OpenAI’s Greg Brockman says AI should just use the computer, not a maze of connectors. That could make agents simpler than all the MCPs, CLIs, and APIs being built around them.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Meredith Shubel — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman used a16z this week to make a blunt case for simplicity. Developers, he said, have spent years “retooling the world” so AI agents can reach software through connectors. His alternative is easier to describe: let the model use a computer the way a person does.
That idea sits at the center of Brockman’s view of where AI should go next. He wants “one AI that’s unified,” something that makes it easier to interact less with the machine instead of wrapping yourself around it. In his telling, the current setup of MCP servers, CLIs, APIs, and similar integrations gets the job done, but it also turns software into a patchwork of machine-friendly access points that are not really built for humans.
Brockman says OpenAI has been circling this since the company’s early days. He pointed back to an offsite in November 2015, where the team laid out a three-step plan and, by his account, largely stayed with it for the next 10 years. He also said the group discussed reinforcement learning against screen pixels, keyboard, and mouse — the same interface a person uses. That, in his view, could let an agent handle nearly any task without waiting for someone to build a custom connector first.
The pitch is attractive because it cuts through a lot of plumbing. No more building and maintaining a fresh integration for every app when an agent could just click, type, and move through software on its own. Brockman even tied computer use to his view that GPT-6 Astra is “pretty reasonable to call” AGI.
But the rest of the industry is not packing up its connector tools. AWS just rolled out a managed consent portal, a managed web experience, and a session binding endpoint for AgentCore Gateway in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, with a Monday walkthrough to match. Even OpenAI has not fully abandoned plugins: Codex can work in the browser, but plugins still matter because they let it talk directly to Slack, Gmail, and GitHub instead of poking around each interface by hand.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Brockman is right about the mess. The industry loves connectors because connectors are easy to sell, but they also look like a permanent tax on every new agent. The cleaner bet is still computer use, because software that needs a special bridge for every doorway has already admitted the design is broken.
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