SAN FRANCISCO – OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati is leaving the artificial intelligence startup, a surprise move that marks the latest high-profile departure from the company.
“I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” Ms Murati wrote in a post on X on Sept 25, adding that she will work to ensure a smooth transition.
Ms Murati had been a central figure at the company, serving as its interim chief executive officer (CEO) after Mr Sam Altman was briefly ousted in November 2023.
In a response to her post, Mr Altman expressed “tremendous gratitude” for what Ms Murati helped the company accomplish, writing, “It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally”. He also said that he would share more with employees about transition plans soon.
Hours later, OpenAI’s chief research officer, Mr Bob McGrew, and a vice president of research, Mr Barret Zoph, announced their plans to leave as well. Mr Zoph said in a post on X that he was “exploring new opportunities”, while Mr McGrew did not post publicly.
Representatives for OpenAI declined to provide further comment beyond the posts.
On Sept 25, many employees were shocked by the announcement of Ms Murati’s departure. On the company’s internal Slack, multiple OpenAI employees responded to the news with a “wtf” emoji, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
Ms Murati, an Albanian-born Dartmouth-educated engineer, played a key role in shepherding major product releases, including OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot, its DALL-E image generation software, and its recently released advanced voice mode that lets users talk to ChatGPT in essentially real time.
This spring, Ms Murati came under fire for saying in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that she was not sure whether Sora, a text-to-video generator that OpenAI has showed off but not yet released, was trained on user-generated videos from YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.
Such a use of YouTube content would be an infraction of the platform’s terms of service, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan later told Bloomberg.
Following Mr Altman’s ouster, Ms Murati gained a higher profile after being appointed as interim CEO – but she quickly joined a group of executives pushing for Mr Altman to be reinstated.
The executives’ departure marks the latest exit at the company since Mr Altman’s firing and re-hiring last year. Mr Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist, left in May. In August, co-founder Mr Greg Brockman said he would go on leave until the end of the year and researcher Mr John Schulman left for AI rival Anthropic.
The departures leave only two members of OpenAI’s original founding team at the company: Mr Altman and Mr Wojciech Zaremba.
In her post on X, the text of which she earlier sent to employees at the company, Ms Murati said she was grateful to have worked with the OpenAI team. “Together, we’ve pushed the boundaries of scientific understanding in our quest to improve human well-being,” she wrote.
Seperately, OpenAI is discussing giving CEO Altman a 7 per cent equity stake in the company and restructuring to become a for-profit business, people familiar with the matter said, a major shift that would mark the first time Mr Altman is granted ownership in the artificial intelligence startup. The transition is still under discussion and a timeline has not been determined, one of the people said.
In a statement, a spokesperson said OpenAI remains “focused on building AI that benefits everyone”, adding, “the non-profit is core to our mission and will continue to exist”. BLOOMBERG, THE NEW YORK TIMES
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