Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, during an interview on “The Circuit with Emily Chang” in San Francisco on April 4, 2023.
Philip Pacheco | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, said Wednesday that she is leaving the company after six and a half years.
“After careful consideration, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she wrote in a note to the company, which she also posted on the social media site X, adding: “There is never a perfect time to leave a place you cherish, but this feels like an opportune time.”
Murati is the latest high-profile executive to leave the startup. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and former head of security Jan Leike announced their departures in May. Co-founder John Schulman announced last month that he was leaving the company to join competitor Anthropic.
Murati also wrote that she was “stepping away because I wanted to create the time and space to do my own exploration. Right now, my main focus is to do everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we’ve built.”
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 people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because details of the round have not been made public. Thrive Capital is leading the round and plans to invest $1 billion, with Tiger Global also planning to join. Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple are also reportedly in talks to invest.
While OpenAI has been in hypergrowth mode since late 2022, when it launched ChatGPT, it has simultaneously been plagued by controversy and high-profile 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 would likely lead to the disappearance of some creative jobs.
“Some creative jobs may disappear, but maybe they shouldn’t have existed in the first place if the resulting content is not of very high quality,” Murati said in an onstage interview, adding: “I really believe that using it as a tool for education (and) creativity will expand our intelligence, our creativity and our imagination.”
Murati became a household 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 had focused on ensuring that AI did not harm humans, while others, including Altman, were more eager to move forward with implementing new technologies.
Nearly all of OpenAI’s employees had signed an open letter saying they would resign in response to the board’s decision. Within days, Altman was back at the company and Murati resumed her former role as CTO. Board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley had left. Sutskever was removed from the board but remained an employee at the time.
