OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announced on Wednesday that she is leaving the company to pursue her own research after more than six years at the AI startup.
“After much consideration, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she said in the post. “While there is never an ideal time to step away from a place I care about, I feel the time is now. My six and a half years with the OpenAI team have been a special privilege.”
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment further and referred TechCrunch to Murati's tweet.
CEO Sam Altman responded to Murati's tweet in a separate post, expressing his gratitude. “We'll share more about our transition plans soon, but for now I just want to say thank you,” Altman said. “I owe Murati an enormous debt of gratitude for all he's helped us build and achieve, but most of all I'm personally grateful for the support and love he's shown us during these difficult times.”
I replied: Thank you so much for everything, Mila.
It's hard to express how much Mira means to OpenAI, to our mission, and to all of us.
I owe her a huge debt of gratitude for what she has helped us build and achieve, but most of all I am personally grateful for…
— Sam Altman (@sama) September 25, 2024
The decision comes just a week before DevDay, OpenAI's annual developer conference.
When Altman was abruptly fired by OpenAI's previous board late last year, the board appointed Murati as interim CEO. Murati, along with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, reportedly lobbied the remaining members of the board prior to Altman's firing to express concerns about his behavior.
Altman is increasingly asserting control over OpenAI and its image.
On Monday, Altman wrote a blog post making hyperbolic claims that OpenAI could achieve “superintelligence” in the next few years, and he is reportedly preparing to acquire his first equity stake in OpenAI as the company prepares to move away from its non-profit governance structure.
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 as VP of Applied AI and Partnerships. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, she led efforts on the company's AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, text-to-image AI DALL-E, and Codex, the code generation system that powers GitHub's Copilot product.
She has a degree in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth College and previously worked as an intern at Goldman Sachs and then at French aerospace group Zodiac Aerospace S. She spent three years at Tesla as a senior product manager for the company's crossover SUV, the Model X, during which the company released an early version of Autopilot, its AI-enabled driver-assistance software.
In 2016, Murati joined LeapMotion, a startup developing hand- and finger-tracking motion sensors for PCs, as vice president of product and engineering. Murati wanted to make interacting with a computer “as intuitive as playing with a ball,” she told Fast Company in an interview. But she quickly realized that the technology, which relied on VR headsets, was premature.
As CTO of OpenAI, Murati developed something of a reputation for making controversial statements.
She once vaguely claimed in an interview that OpenAI's AI would achieve “PhD-level” intelligence, and raised some eyebrows in June by suggesting that AI would replace creative jobs that “should never exist in the first place.”
“Creative jobs may go away, but if the content that comes out of them isn't very high quality, then maybe those jobs shouldn't have existed in the first place,” Murati said in an interview onstage at The Wall Street Journal's WSJ Tech Live conference. “I think it's really important to use creative jobs as a teaching tool.” [and] Creativity expands our intelligence, our creativity and our imagination.”
Murati is the latest executive to leave OpenAI in recent months: Sutskever and former safety chief Jan Rijcke announced their departures in May, while co-founder John Schulman said last month he was moving to rival Anthropik, while OpenAI president Greg Brockman is on sabbatical until the end of the year.
Murati's decision to step down comes as OpenAI is reportedly in the midst of a funding round that could value the company at more than $150 billion. Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple and Thrive Capital are reportedly in investment talks, and Bloomberg and other sources say the round could ultimately reach $6.5 billion.
OpenAI is in desperate need of funding. The company has spent about $7 billion on training its models and $1.5 billion on staff, according to The Information. At one point, OpenAI was said to be running about $700,000 a day on ChatGPT alone. Altman said it cost more than $100 million to train the company's former flagship GPT-4 model.