NYMag Profiles OpenAI's Ex-Instagram Charm Chief Charles Porch

Charles Porch, OpenAI's first VP of global creative partnerships, is "rich, super-connected, and tasked with getting celebrities (and everyone else) to not hate AI so much," according to Charlotte Klein's New York Magazine profile. Porch spent more than a decade at Instagram onboarding boldface names before OpenAI poached him as its first-ever VP of global creative partnerships, seeking to win over a skeptical Hollywood.

Porch helped arrange a dinner at Gwyneth Paltrow's Amagansett home honoring Sam Altman, originally scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 29, and later postponed. Across the same stretch of summer, OpenAI ran "Summer Club," its first influencer brand retreat, at Wildflower Farms in upstate New York. The itinerary ran to farm-to-table dinners, beekeeping sessions, and workshops on the newly released ChatGPT Work.

The optics did not survive contact with social media. Backlash centered on the $5,000-a-night suites against AI's environmental footprint and OpenAI's $500 billion Ohio data center deal, and at least one influencer appeared to delete the video she posted about the trip.

Porch's playbook reads like talent management. In announcing the hire, he told Vanity Fair his first step would be "a huge listening tour, just to start on where people are with AI, where they think it's going, their hopes, their fears, whatever that might be." Puck's Matthew Belloni was blunter about the mood: "summers in the Hamptons just aren't complete these days without sucking up to our new AI overlords."

The charm offensive sits inside a wider OpenAI push on our radar this week, from four deals signed at ADIPEC in Abu Dhabi to a post-midterm lobby for mandatory AI speed limits. Porch's remit is the softest edge of that strategy.