Mira Murati, Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, has announced her departure from the company after six and a half years of work. The talented engineer, whose work was key to the development of ChatGPT, is completely leaving the artificial intelligence (AI) company led by Sam Altman.
“My six and a half years with the OpenAI team have been an extraordinary privilege,” she said in a message on X. In the post, she thanked the team and added that she has made this decision because she believes it is time to focus on her own projects. Murati wrote that she is leaving because she wants to “create the time and space” to do her own exploration.
Mira Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 after working at the virtual reality company Leap Motion and at Tesla. At that time, it was a very different company than the one we know now. It was barely three years old and GPT-2 had not yet seen the light of day. Before joining OpenAI, she worked on the Model X at Tesla and was Vice President of Product and Engineering at Leap Motion, which was working on an augmented reality system to replace keyboards and mice with hand gestures.
In 2019, the OpenAI name began to gain prominence when GPT-2 demonstrated the ability to generate text similar to what we humans produce. That same year, the firm moved completely away from its “non-profit” essence and began operating a for-profit subsidiary.
During her tenure, Murati played a key role in positioning OpenAI as a reference company, diagramming the company’s supercomputing strategy and managing research teams that developed ChatGPT, DALL·E, and Codex. Under her leadership, OpenAI has not only created smarter models but has changed the way these systems reason and learn, addressing complex problems with innovative solutions.
In November of last year, the OpenAI board of directors appointed Mira Murati as interim CEO after the dismissal of Sam Altman. After several chaotic days, Altman returned to his original position, and the same happened with Murati, who returned to being CTO.
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At the time of publishing this article, we do not have details on Murati’s future plans. OpenAI has also not announced the name of the person who will assume the CTO role. Experts are expecting organizational changes are on the horizon for the company.
Murati’s departure is part of a series of recent changes in OpenAI’s top management. In recent months, several senior executives have left the company. Greg Brockman, who served as chairman of the board of directors, announced last August that he would be taking a “sabbatical” for a year. John Schulman, one of the 11 co-founders and responsible for the “alignment” of AI models, also left the company to join rival Anthropic. Peter Deng, from the product team, also recently left the company. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever left the company earlier this year after a boardroom battle in which Altman was temporarily ousted from the company.
This wave of departures has raised questions about the stability and future of the company, which has consolidated itself as a leader in the artificial intelligence sector. Altman has responded with warm words to Murati: “Mira, thank you for everything. It is difficult to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to all of us personally.”
In recent developments, OpenAI launched a new series of AI models earlier this month designed to spend more time thinking, with the hope that the generative AI chatbots will provide more accurate and beneficial responses. The new model, nicknamed Strawberry, is designed to tackle complex tasks and solve more complex problems in science, coding, and mathematics, something previous models have been criticized for not providing consistently.
Unlike their predecessors, these models have been trained to refine their thought processes, try different methods, and recognize errors before deploying a final response. OpenAI’s push to improve “thinking” in its model is a response to the persistent problem of “hallucinations” in AI chatbots. This refers to their tendency to generate persuasive but incorrect content, which has somewhat cooled enthusiasm for ChatGPT-style AI features among business customers.
The new launch comes as OpenAI is reportedly raising funds that could value it at around $150 billion, making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world, according to US media.
