A longtime OpenAI executive who briefly replaced Sam Altman as CEO is leaving
OpenAI is losing yet another high-level executive with the departure of chief technology officer Mira Murati.
Murati, who spent six-and-a-half years at the artificial intelligence startup, announced Wednesday that she had “made the difficult decision” to leave and that she wants “to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” After OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted in November, Murati served as interim leader of the company.
In her announcement, Murati thanked Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman “for their trust in me to lead the technical organization and for their support throughout the years.”
“There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes,” Murati said, “yet this moment feels right.” In her statement, Murati noted OpenAI’s recent releases of speech-to-speech capability and its latest model series, OpenAI 01, which the company says can “reason” through more complex tasks and problems in science, coding, and math than the startup’s earlier models could.
“We didn’t merely build smarter models, we fundamentally changed how AI systems learn and reason through complex problems,” Murati said.
Altman responded to Murati’s statement on X (META), saying: “It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally.”
“I feel tremendous gratitude towards her for what she has helped us build and accomplish, but most of all feel personal gratitude towards her for the support and love during all the hard times,” Altman said.
Murati’s resignation comes four months after OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, resigned from the company. Sutskever was co-lead of the startup’s “superalignment” team, which was focused on AI’s existential dangers, alongside Jan Leike, who also resigned in May.