OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, is one of several employees leaving the company, sparking a leadership shakeup at the AI startup amid discussions of changes to its corporate structure.
“After much consideration, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” Murati said in a message to employees on Wednesday. Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and Vice President of Research Barrett Zoff also announced they were leaving the company on Wednesday.
It’s the latest blow for the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence startup, which has seen several high-profile departures this year, including founders John Shulman and Ilya Sutskever, who joined rival Anthropik and launched his own venture aiming to build “safe” AI models.
After Greg Brockman announced in August that he would be taking a leave of absence until the end of the year, only two of OpenAI’s 11 founders remain.
Murati, 35, has led the company’s efforts to build ChatGPT as a standalone product, building on the technical advances made in its underlying large-scale language model, GPT. Murati has also overseen the release and refinement of the company’s image generator Dall-E and AI code generator Codex since joining OpenAI in 2018.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company has appointed Mark Chen as senior vice president of research and promoted Josh Akiam from research scientist to chief mission coordination to ensure “all the pieces (and culture) are in place to make the mission a success.”
“Management changes are a natural part of any company, especially one that is fast-growing and demanding,” Altman added. “I wouldn’t say it was natural that these personnel changes were so sudden, but we’re not a normal company.”
“While Mira, Bob and Barrett each made these decisions independently and amicably, given the timing of Mira’s decision, it makes sense to do this all at once so we can work together to ensure a smooth transition to the next generation of leadership,” he added in X’s post.
Murati was named interim CEO after OpenAI’s board fired Altman in November for a lack of candor. Murati served in that role for four days before Altman was reinstated following intense pressure from investors and employees. Murati was then approved to return to the board following an independent investigation into his conduct.
Murati’s departure is a reminder of the lasting scars the incident left on the fast-growing San Francisco startup, which was founded as a nonprofit dedicated to developing artificial general intelligence aimed at replicating human intelligence to benefit humanity as a whole. In 2019, the company changed its structure to incorporate companies with profit caps, allowing it to raise big funding from the likes of Microsoft, which invested $13 billion.
The ChatGPT developer is now one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable companies, having raised more than $6 billion at a $150 billion valuation, according to people familiar with the matter.
At the same time, the company is in talks to change its corporate structure to make it more investor-friendly and has released new products, including new AI models such as the o1, which is said to have reasoning capabilities, and additional voice capabilities.
“We remain focused on building AI that benefits everyone, and as we’ve said before, we are working with our board to ensure we’re best positioned to achieve our mission. Our nonprofit foundation is and will remain core to our mission,” OpenAI said.
Murati said on Wednesday that he was stepping down because he wanted to “create time and space for personal exploration,” adding that his main focus was “ensuring a smooth transition.”
“I may no longer be on the battlefield with you all, but I will always continue to support you,” she wrote.
Messrs. Sutskever and Murati were two of the senior executives who raised concerns about Altman to the board in October, a month before last year’s leadership upheaval, three people familiar with the matter said. Those concerns included Mr. Altman’s leadership style, which they felt was undermining and pitting employees against one another, one of the people said. Mr. Murati and others added that they believe Mr. Altman’s behavior created a toxic environment that led to the board’s decision and the steps it took to fire him.
But within a day of Mr. Altman’s firing, Messrs. Sutskever and Murati began negotiating for Mr. Altman’s return, and they stayed on at OpenAI after he returned as CEO. As the startup tried to emerge from a shaky situation, rifts emerged over pressure to commercialize the company and develop a monetizable product, former and current employees said.
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“Overall, the company has become noticeably more like a regular tech company over time — more product-oriented, more winning-oriented and less altruistic,” the former employee said.
“The core researchers are still loyal to Sam personally and are working on this because they want to build (AI) and not to make money.”
“I was dismayed to see the former board attempt to scapegoat me with anonymous and misleading allegations as a last resort to save face in the media,” Murati said in March, telling staff he had a “strong and productive relationship” with Altman and had “not hesitated” to provide feedback to him.
Messrs. Murati and Sutskever declined to comment.
Additional reporting by George Hammond
