Jonathan Lachman, the former head of special projects at OpenAI, recently left to join a new artificial intelligence research lab founded by former OpenAI director Mira Murati, according to two people familiar with the discussions. It's the most high-profile appointment Murati has made since leaving OpenAI last September to start the much-hyped venture, which focuses on exploring so-called artificial general intelligence.
Murati has so far poached a total of about ten researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Character AI and Google DeepMind. Her startup is still in its early stages: It doesn't yet have a name or a set product direction, according to two people familiar with the company.
Murati and Lachman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed Lachman's departure.
Murati left OpenAI less than a year after CEO Sam Altman was abruptly fired by the company's board of directors in late 2023. In the turmoil that followed, the board of directors briefly appointed Murati, who was then serving as the company's chief technology officer, as interim CEO.
The move was a blow to Altman. “I thought: that feels very bad,” he told podcaster Lex Fridman last March. He described Murati's promotion as “the nadir” of the dramatic leadership crisis that briefly consumed OpenAI. Less than a week later and after more than 730 OpenAI employees threatened to leave, Altman was reinstated as CEO.
Altman and Murati continued to work closely at OpenAI after the incident. “She did a great job that weekend amid a lot of chaos,” Altman told Fridman on the podcast. When Murati left the company ten months later, she thanked Altman in her farewell letter.
“There is never an ideal time to step away from a place you cherish,” she wrote in the message to OpenAI employees, which she later posted to X. She added that she “stepped away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” A month later, Reuters reported that Murati was trying to raise more than $100 million to fund a mysterious new company, although that figure had not yet been finalized.
OpenAI's vice president of research, Barret Zoph, and head of research, Bob McGrew, both left around the same time as Murati. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, followed suit in May last year. He then founded Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on AI safety. Within three months, Sutskever's startup had raised $1 billion. Anthropic, a major competitor to OpenAI, was also founded by former OpenAI executives and has raised billions of dollars in funding, including $8 billion from Amazon.
