OpenAI’s executive exodus is continuing with three top leaders announcing their exits Wednesday, including Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati.
Murati — who has been instrumental in the development of ChatGPT and the artificial intelligence image generator Dall-E — said Wednesday afternoon in a post on X that she is leaving the company. Shortly after, OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and Vice President of Research Barret Zoph also announced their decisions to exit.
“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.”
The Wednesday departures are just the latest in 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.
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 $150 billion, Bloomberg and others have reported.
The latest exits come 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.
Taken together, the string of departures leave CEO Sam Altman without much of the leadership team that helped him rapidly grow OpenAI into an artificial intelligence juggernaut, and could consolidate power under Altman just as the company seeks to restructure.
“Mira, Bob, and Barret made these decisions independently of each other and amicably, but the timing of Mira’s decision was such that it made sense to now do this all at once, so that we can work together for a smooth handover to the next generation of leadership,” Altman said in a post on X Wednesday. He added that, “being a leader at OpenAI is all-consuming,” and that the departing execs have “gone above and beyond the call of duty for the company.”
CTO departs
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.
“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.
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.
Altman names new leaders
Later on Wednesday, Altman updated his post to acknowledge the exits of Zoph and McGrew.
McGrew, who joined OpenAI in 2017 when, he said in an X post, it was a “small non-profit,” said he plans to “take a break.”
“There is no better capstone to my work here than shipping o1 to the world,” he added in the post. McGrew said he will remain at OpenAI for two months to support the leadership transition.
Zoph joined OpenAI’s research team in 2022, just ahead of the launch of ChatGPT. He said in an X post that “right now feels like a natural point for me to explore new opportunities outside of OpenAI.”
Altman announced in his post that Mark Chen — who was involved in publicly demonstrating GPT-4o during its launch earlier this year — would replace McGrew as senior vice president of research. He also named a new head of mission alignment, Josh Achiam, to “ensure that we get all pieces (and culture) right to be in a place to succeed at the mission,” as well as a chief information security officer, Josh Knight.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a question about the timeline for Murati’s formal exit for the company, or if and when a new CTO would be announced.
This story has been updated with additional details and context.
