Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer who temporarily served as chief executive during the failed coup against founder Sam Altman last year, is leaving the company.
In a message shared with the start-up’s employees on Wednesday, she said: “After much reflection, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI.”
It is the latest blow to the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence start-up, which has had several high-profile departures this year, including founders John Schulman and Ilya Sutskever. Schulman has joined rival Anthropic, while Sutskever has launched his own venture aimed at building “safe” AI models.
Only two of OpenAI’s 11 founders remain, after Greg Brockman in August announced he would be taking a leave of absence until the end of the year.
Murati, 35, spent six and a half years at OpenAI and led the company’s efforts to build ChatGPT as a standalone product, building on the technical breakthroughs made with GPT, the large language model that underpins it. She also oversaw releases and improvements of the company’s image-generator Dall-E and AI code generator Codex.
Last November, she was made interim CEO after OpenAI’s board ousted Altman for what they said was his failure to be candid. Murati was in the position for four days until Altman returned, following intense pressure from investors and staff. He was later cleared to rejoin the board following an independent review into his conduct.
Murati’s departure is a reminder of lingering scars that incident left at the rapidly growing San Francisco start-up, which was first founded as a non-profit dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence — which aims to replicate human intelligence — would benefit all of humanity. In 2019, it changed its structure to include a capped-profit enterprise, allowing it to raise large amounts of capital from the likes of Microsoft, which has invested $13bn.
The ChatGPT-maker is now one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable companies and is raising more than $6bn at a $150bn valuation, said multiple people familiar with the matter.
At the same time, it is in discussions to change its corporate structure to become more investor-friendly and has released new products, including new AI models such as o1, which it says are capable of reasoning, and additional voice capabilities.
“There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right,” Murati wrote. She said she was leaving because she wished to “create the time and space to do my own exploration”. She added her primary focus would be to “ensure a smooth transition”.
“While I may no longer be in the trenches with you, I will still be rooting for you all,” she wrote.
In October, a month before last year’s leadership turmoil, Sutskever and Murati were two of the senior executives who brought concerns about Altman to the board, said three people close to the matter. Their concerns included Altman’s leadership style, which they felt undermined and pitted people against one another, one of the people said. Murati and others believed his actions created a toxic environment, and fed into the board’s decision to fire the CEO, and the means by which they did so, they added.
When Altman was fired by the board, Murati was notified and installed as interim CEO. However, within a day, Sutskever and Murati were negotiating for Altman’s return.
Both stayed at OpenAI after his reinstatement as CEO. As the start-up tried to recover from the instability, a rift developed over the commercialisation of the company and a pressure to develop products that it could monetise, said former and current employees.
“As a whole the company has definitely become more of a normal tech company over time, more product-oriented and winning-oriented and less altruistic,” said a former employee.
“The core researchers are still loyal to Sam personally and are in it because they want to build [artificial general intelligence], not because they want to make money.”
Another current employee lamented the loss of a senior female executive at OpenAI, because AI is an area where women are typically under-represented, particularly in technical leadership.
In March, Murati said it was “disheartening to witness the previous board’s efforts to scapegoat me with anonymous and misleading claims in a last-ditch effort to save face in the media”, telling staff she had a “strong and productive relationship” with Altman and was “not shy” in her feedback to him.
Murati and Sutskever declined to comment. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Murati joined the company in 2018, having previously worked at augmented reality start-up Magic Leap and electric-car maker Tesla.
Altman thanked Murati for her contributions in response to her announcement. “It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally,” he said. “I feel tremendous gratitude towards her for what she has helped us build and accomplish, but I most of all feel personal gratitude towards her for the support and love during all the hard times.”
Additional reporting by George Hammond
