OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, stepped down on Wednesday, saying she wanted “time and space to do some soul-searching.” Murati was one of the company’s three top executives behind ChatGPT and briefly led the company last year while the board was fighting over the fate of CEO Sam Altman.
“There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place you love, but this moment feels right,” she wrote in a message to OpenAI staff posted on X.
“Words cannot express how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and us personally,” Altman wrote in response to Murati’s X post, adding that he “personally thanks her for the support and love she has shown us during these difficult times.”
A successor was not immediately announced.
Through his personal spokesperson, Murati declined to comment further, and OpenAI also declined to comment, referring inquiries to Murati’s tweet.
Before joining OpenAI in 2018, Murati worked at Tesla and LeapMotion. At the time, OpenAI was a small non-profit research institute focused on developing AI systems that could replicate a range of human tasks. But following the phenomenal success of ChatGPT, the organization grew rapidly and its focus became increasingly commercialized. The company is rethinking itself as a non-profit, and investors are increasingly eager to bet billions of dollars on the company’s future.
OpenAI was rocked by a dramatic board coup last November that saw CEO Sam Altman ousted and temporarily replaced by Murati, after much of the staff threatened to resign and pleas from investors including Microsoft, which had pumped billions of dollars into the company, before Altman returned with a new board.
In the months that followed, several OpenAI executives and senior engineers left the company. Ilya Sutskever, one of the company’s first hires and the technical mind behind much of its early work, resigned from the company in May.
Sutskever’s departure was soon followed by that of Jan Reicke, the engineer who led the company’s long-term AI safety effort with Sutskever. John Shulman, the engineer who took over leading the safety effort, resigned in August. In August, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, a board member sympathetic to Altman, announced he was taking a leave of absence from the company through the end of the year.
Many former OpenAI executives and researchers have launched new AI companies. Notably, Sutskever launched Safe Superintelligence this year, which focuses on developing safe artificial intelligence. Former OpenAI research chief Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela founded Anthropic in 2021, and it is now one of the company’s main rivals for customers.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.
