New York CNN —
Mira Murati, chief technology officer at OpenAI, who has been instrumental in developing ChatGPT and the artificial intelligence image generator Dall-E, announced on Wednesday that she is leaving the company.
“The six and a half years I’ve spent with the OpenAI team have been a special privilege,” Murati said in a note to the OpenAI team posted on X. “While there’s never an ideal time to leave a place I love, I feel the time is right.”
Murati is one of a series of executives to leave OpenAI recently. The leadership changes come as the ChatGPT developer seeks to chart a controversial path to growth, including easier investor funding and revenue generation.
The company, which was founded as a nonprofit research institute before establishing a for-profit arm, is considering a restructuring that could bring greater returns to investors. Bloomberg and other media outlets have reported that OpenAI is in talks to raise a new round of funding that could value it at $150 billion.
Murati’s departure comes after OpenAI’s chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever left the company in May to start a new company focused on safer AI. Fellow OpenAI co-founder John Shulman also left in August to join rival Anthropik. OpenAI’s president and co-founder Greg Brockman is also currently on sabbatical.
Murati joined OpenAI’s leadership team in 2018 after working at augmented reality (AR) companies Ultraleap (then Leap Motion) and Tesla. After ChatGPT was publicly released in 2022, Murati led OpenAI to garner attention in Silicon Valley and beyond, helping to spark an AI arms race in the tech world.
Last November, she was briefly promoted to interim CEO at OpenAI during a chaotic leadership transition that saw Sam Altman ousted but soon reinstated to the role. During the debacle, Murati, along with more than 500 OpenAI employees, threatened to resign unless Altman was brought back to the company.
More recently, Murati has overseen major advancements in the company’s technology, including the May release of GPT-4o, the AI model that brought human-like conversation to ChatGPT, and this month’s preview of OpenAI o1, an AI model that the company says can “reason” and solve more difficult scientific and mathematical problems.
“Our recent releases of speech synthesis and OpenAI o1 herald a new era of interaction and intelligence. We’ve not just built smarter models, we’ve fundamentally changed how AI systems learn and reason about complex problems,” Murati said in the memo announcing his departure.
Murati said he was leaving OpenAI to “create time and space for my own exploration,” but that he would support the leadership transition.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to questions about the timeline for her formal departure or when a new CTO might be announced.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to Murati’s X post with his own post, saying, “Words cannot express how much Mira means to OpenAI, to our mission, and to all of us.”
“I owe her so much for all she has helped us build and achieve, but most of all, I personally thank her for the support and love she has shown us during a challenging time, and I look forward to seeing what she does next,” Altman said, adding that the company will announce more details about its leadership transition plans in the near future.
This story has been updated with additional details and background information.
