(Reuters) – Mira Murati, chief technology officer at Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, is leaving the company, the executive said in a post on X, the latest in a series of executive departures this year.
“I am stepping away as I want to create time and space for some self-exploration,” Murati wrote in X’s post.
Hours after Murati’s departure, two other technical leaders, Barrett Zoff and Bob McGrew, also left the company, according to a post on X from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to their LinkedIn profiles, Zoff held the title of vice president of research and McGrew was chief research officer.
The resignation comes shortly after the company reportedly raised a $6.5 billion funding round at a valuation of $150 billion, subject to an overhaul of its corporate structure. The company plans to reorganize as a for-profit public benefit corporation and give Altman a stake, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
The funding round has not yet closed and the company is still finalizing it.
It is unclear whether Murati’s resignation will affect the ongoing fundraising. Some fundraising documents contain “material adverse effect” clauses that allow investors to walk away from a deal if the company experiences a material adverse event.
Murati has been with ChatGPT’s developers for six and a half years, and briefly served as CEO when the company’s board briefly fired co-founder Altman in November last year, then shockingly reinstated him.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Murati joined OpenAI in December 2020 as “VP of Applied AI and Partnerships” and was promoted to CTO in May 2022. Prior to joining OpenAI, he worked at virtual and augmented reality startup Leap Motion and Tesla.
As CTO, Murati appeared frequently alongside Altman as the public face of ChatGPT’s makers, and when OpenAI unveiled its GPT-4o model capable of lifelike voice conversations in May, Murati led the presentation.
Murati is the latest in a string of executive departures from OpenAI. In August, OpenAI co-founder John Shulman announced at X that he was joining rival AI company Anthropic, and another co-founder, Greg Brockman, said he was taking a leave of absence from X until the end of the year. A third co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, also left OpenAI in May.
Altman also announced a series of internal promotions at X, promoting Matt Knight to chief information security officer, Josh Akiam to chief mission coordination officer, and Mark Chen to senior vice president of research.
(Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco and Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru; Editing by Shaunak Dasgupta, Cynthia Osterman, David Gregorio and Jonathan Oatis)
