OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announced on Wednesday that she is leaving the company to pursue her own independent pursuits after more than six years at the AI startup.
“After much consideration, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she said in the post. “While there’s never an ideal time to step away from a place you care about, I feel the time is now.”
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment further and referred TechCrunch to Murati’s tweet.
CEO Sam Altman responded to Murati’s tweet with a separate post expressing his gratitude.
“We will share more about our transition plans soon, but for now we just want to say thank you,” Altman said.
The decision comes just a week before DevDay, OpenAI’s annual developer conference.
When Altman was abruptly fired by OpenAI’s previous board late last year, the board appointed Murati as interim CEO. Murati, along with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, reportedly lobbied the remaining members of the board prior to Altman’s firing to express concerns about his behavior.
Altman is increasingly asserting control over OpenAI and its image.
On Monday, Altman wrote a blog post making hyperbolic claims that OpenAI could achieve “superintelligence” in the next few years, and is reportedly preparing to acquire his first equity stake in OpenAI as the company prepares to move away from its non-profit governance structure.
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 as VP of Applied AI and Partnerships. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, she led the development of the company’s AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, text-to-image AI DALL-E, and Codex, the code generation system that powers GitHub’s Copilot product.
Murati, who holds a degree in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth College and previously worked as an intern at Goldman Sachs and then at French aerospace group Zodiac Aerospace SA, spent three years at Tesla as senior product manager for the company’s Model X crossover SUV, during which the company released an early version of its AI-powered driver-assistance software, Autopilot.
In 2016, Murati joined LeapMotion, a startup developing hand- and finger-tracking motion sensors for PCs, as vice president of product and engineering. Murati wanted to make interacting with a computer “as intuitive as playing with a ball,” she told Fast Company in an interview. But she quickly realized that the technology, which relied on VR headsets, was premature.
As CTO of OpenAI, Murati has developed a reputation for making controversial statements.
She once vaguely claimed in an interview that OpenAI’s AI would achieve “PhD-level” intelligence, and raised some eyebrows in June by suggesting that AI would replace creative jobs that “should never exist in the first place.”
“Creative jobs may go away, but if the quality of content that comes out of them isn’t that great, then maybe creative jobs shouldn’t have existed in the first place,” Murati said in an interview onstage at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference. “I really believe that using creative jobs as an educational and creative tool can broaden our intellect, our creativity and our imagination,” he added.
Murati is the latest executive to leave OpenAI in recent months: Sutskever and former safety chief Jan Rijcke announced their departures in May, while co-founder John Schulman said last month he was moving to rival Anthropik, while OpenAI president Greg Brockman is on sabbatical until the end of the year.
Murati’s decision to step down comes as OpenAI is reportedly in the midst of a funding round that could value the company at more than $150 billion. Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple and Thrive Capital are reportedly in investment talks, and Bloomberg and other sources say the round could ultimately reach $6.5 billion.
OpenAI is in desperate need of funding: The company is spending about $7 billion on training its models and $1.5 billion on staffing, according to The Information. At one point, ChatGPT alone was reportedly costing OpenAI about $700,000 a day to operate.
