Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, resigned Wednesday, saying she “wants the time and space to do my own research.” Murati was one of three executives at the top of the company behind ChatGPT and briefly led it last year as board members grappled with the fate of CEO Sam Altman.
“There's never an ideal time to step away from a place you cherish, but this moment feels right,” she wrote in a message to OpenAI staff posted on X.
Altman responded to Murati's X-post by writing that “it's hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to all of us personally.” He added that he feels “personal gratitude to her for the support and love during all the difficult times.”
In a longer message on X Wednesday night, Altman explained: “Mira has been instrumental to the progress and growth of OpenAI over the past 6.5 years; she has been a huge factor in our development from an unknown research lab to a major company,” he wrote. “When Mira told me this morning that she was leaving, I was sad, but of course supportive of her decision.”
In the same statement, Altman also announced the departures of Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and Vice President of Research Barret Zoph. A successor for Murati was not immediately announced; Altman provided a detailed overview of a reshuffled leadership team in light of McGrew and Zoph's departures from the company.
Murati declined to comment further through a personal spokesperson. OpenAI also declined to comment, referring questions to Murati's tweet.
Murati previously worked at Tesla and Leap Motion before joining OpenAI in 2018. At the time, OpenAI was a small nonprofit research lab focused on developing an AI system that could mirror a wide range of human tasks. But in the wake of ChatGPT’s astonishing success, the organization has grown dramatically and become increasingly commercially focused. The company has rethought its nonprofit structure amid growing investor appetite to invest billions of dollars in its future.
Murati came to OpenAI with the belief that AI would be “the most important set of technologies that humanity has ever built,” she told Fortune last year. “The mission of OpenAI really resonated with me, to build a technology that benefits people.”
OpenAI was rocked by a dramatic boardroom shakeup last November, when CEO Sam Altman was fired and briefly replaced by Murati. After most of the staff threatened to resign and pleas from investors including Microsoft, which had poured billions into the company, Altman was reinstated with an entirely new board.
In the months that followed, several members of OpenAI’s leadership team stepped down from the company, along with senior engineers. Ilya Sutskever, one of the company’s earliest hires, the technical brains behind much of its early work, and a board member who had voted to remove Altman before he rescinded his resignation, resigned from the company in May.
Sutskever’s departure was followed shortly thereafter by that of Jan Leike, an engineer who led Sutskever’s long-term AI safety work. John Schulman, the engineer who led the safety work, stepped down in August. In August, Greg Brockman, a co-founder of OpenAI and a board member who assisted Altman, said he was taking a sabbatical from the company through the end of the year.
A number of former OpenAI executives and researchers have gone on to start 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, now one of the company’s main rivals for customers.
A source familiar with the situation says Murati's last day at OpenAI has not yet been decided and that discussions are underway between her and OpenAI leadership to ensure a smooth transition.
Updated 9/25/24 9:12 p.m. ET: This story has been updated with additional OpenAI departures.
