Mira Murati, OpenAI's technology chief, becomes the latest exec to leave the company

Mira Murati, the outgoing chief technology officer of OpenAI, speaks during The Wall Street Journal's WSJ Tech Live Conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., on Oct.17, 2023. (Patrick T. Fallon via CNN Newsource)

OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati — who has been instrumental in the development of ChatGPT and the artificial intelligence image generator Dall-E — said Wednesday she is leaving the company.

"My six-and-a-half years with the OpenAI team have been an extraordinary privilege," Murati said in a note to the OpenAI team, which she posted to X. "There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right."

Murati joins a string of executives who have recently left OpenAI. The leadership shakeup comes as the ChatGPT-maker attempts to forge a controversial path to growth, including making it easier to raise funds from investors and generate revenue.

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The company, which was created as a non-profit research lab and built a for-profit arm, has been mulling a restructuring that could lead to more returns for investors. OpenAI is reportedly in talks about a new fundraising round that could value the firm at US$150 billion, Bloomberg and others have reported.

Murati’s exit comes after OpenAI chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever left the company in May to start a new firm dedicated to safer AI. Fellow OpenAI co-founder John Schulman exited in August to join rival Anthropic. And OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman is also currently on extended leave.

Murati joined OpenAI’s leadership team in 2018 after working at augmented reality company Ultraleap (then called Leap Motion) and Tesla. With the public release of ChatGPT in 2022, Murati helped to lead OpenAI as it catapulted to prominence in Silicon Valley and beyond and set off an AI arms race in the tech world.

Last November, she was briefly elevated to interim CEO of OpenAI during the company’s chaotic leadership upheaval, which saw Sam Altman ousted, then quickly restored to the role. During the debacle, Murati joined more than 500 fellow OpenAI employees in threatening to quit if Altman was not brought back to the company.

More recently, Murati oversaw major advancements to the company’s technology, including the May release of GPT-4o, the AI model that brought human-like, spoken conversations to ChatGPT, and this month’s preview of OpenAI o1, an AI model that the company says can "reason" to solve harder science and math problems.

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"Our recent releases of speech-to-speech and OpenAI o1 mark the beginning of a new era of interaction and intelligence … We didn’t merely build smarter models, we fundamentally changed how AI systems learn and reason through complex problems," Murati said in the note announcing her exit.

Murati said she is leaving OpenAI to "create time and space to do my own exploration" but that she would assist with the leadership transition.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a question about the timeline for her formal exit for the company or when a new CTO would be announced.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to Murati’s X post with one of his own, 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 I most of all feel personal gratitude towards her for the support and love during all the hard times. I am excited for what she’ll do next," Altman said, adding that the company would say more about the leadership transition plan soon.