Mira Murati, chief technology officer of OpenAI, during an interview on “The Circuit with Emily Chang” in San Francisco on April 4, 2023.
Philip Pacheco | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said Wednesday that she is leaving the company after six and a half years.
“After much reflection, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she wrote in a memo to the company, which she also published on social media site X, adding, “There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right.”
Murati is the latest high-level executive to depart the startup. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and former safety leader Jan Leike announced their departures in May. Co-founder John Schulman said last month that he was leaving to join rival Anthropic.
Murati also wrote that she is “stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration. For now, my primary focus is doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we’ve built.”
Shortly after Murati announced her departure, Reuters said OpenAI is planning to restructure to a for-profit business that no longer reports to a non-profit board. The company will retain its non-profit segment, according to Reuters.
OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT and SearchGPT, is currently pursuing a funding round that would value the company at more than $150 billion, according to sources familiar with the situation who asked to not be named because details of the round have not been made public. Thrive Capital is leading the round and plans to invest $1 billion, and Tiger Global is planning to join as well. Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple are reportedly also in talks to invest.
While OpenAI has been in hyper-growth mode since late 2022, when it launched ChatGPT, it has been simultaneously riddled with controversy and high-level employee departures, with some current and former employees concerned that the company is growing too quickly to operate safely.
Murati raised eyebrows in June, when she told an audience at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference that new artificial intelligence tools will likely lead to the disappearance of some creative jobs.
“Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place if the content that comes out of it is not very high quality,” Murati said in an on-stage interview, adding, “I really believe that using it as a tool for education [and] creativity will expand our intelligence and creativity and imagination.”
Murati became a well-known name when OpenAI’s board abruptly ousted CEO Sam Altman last November and Murati was named interim CEO.
OpenAI’s board said in a statement at the time that Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications with the board.” The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reported that Sutskever trained his focus on ensuring that AI would not harm humans, while others, including Altman, were instead more eager to push ahead with delivering new technology.
Almost all of OpenAI’s employees had signed an open letter saying they would leave in response to the board’s action. Days later, Altman was back at the company and Murati moved back to her former role as CTO. Board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley were out. Sutskever was removed from the board but remained an employee at the time.