Mira Murati, chief technology officer at OpenAI, is interviewed by “The Circuit with Emily Chang” on April 4, 2023, in San Francisco.
Philip Pacheco | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, announced on Wednesday that she is leaving the company after six and a half years.
“After much consideration, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she wrote in a memo to the company, which was also published on X. “While there’s never an ideal time to step away from a place you care about, I feel the time is now,” she added.
Murati is the latest executive to leave the startup: OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and former safety chief Jan Reicke announced their departures in May. Co-founder John Shulman said last month he was leaving to join rival Anthropik.
Murati also wrote, “I am stepping down because I want to create time and space for personal exploration. At this time, my primary focus is doing all I can to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the momentum we have built.”
OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT and SearchGPT and is backed by Microsoft, is currently in a funding round that could value the company at more than $150 billion, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified 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 expected to participate. Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple are also reportedly in investment talks.
OpenAI has grown rapidly since launching ChatGPT in late 2022, but it has also been plagued by controversy and senior departures, leaving some current and former employees concerned the company is growing too quickly to operate safely.
Murati made headlines in June when he told an audience at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference that new AI tools would likely eliminate some creative jobs.
“Creative jobs may disappear, but if the quality of content that comes out of them is not that great, then maybe creative jobs shouldn’t have existed in the first place,” Murati said in an onstage interview, adding, “I really believe that using creative jobs as an educational and creative tool will expand our intelligence, our creativity and our imagination.”
Murati first came to prominence when OpenAI’s board abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman in November and named him interim CEO.
OpenAI’s board said in a statement at the time that Altman had “not been consistently forthright in his communications with the board.” The Wall Street Journal and other media reported that Sutskever was focused on ensuring that artificial intelligence would not harm people, while others, including Altman, were instead keen to push for new technology deliveries.
Nearly all of OpenAI’s employees signed an open letter stating that they would resign in response to the board’s actions. A few days later, Altman returned to the company, and Murati resumed his previous role as CTO. Directors Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley resigned. Sutskever was removed from the board but remained an employee at the time.