OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati resigned Wednesday, saying she wants “to have the time and space to do my own exploration.” Murati had been among three executives at the top of the company behind ChatGPT, and was briefly its leader last year as board members struggled to decide the fate of CEO Sam Altman.
“There is never an ideal time to step away from a place you hold dear, but this moment feels right,” he wrote in a message to OpenAI staff. published in X.
Altman responded to Murati’s post on X by saying that “it’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to all of us personally.” He added that he feels “personal gratitude to her for the support and love during all the difficult times.”
A successor was not immediately announced.
Murati, through a personal spokesperson, declined to provide further comment. OpenAI also declined to comment, referring queries to Murati’s tweet.
Murati previously worked at Tesla and Leap Motion before joining OpenAI in 2018. At the time, OpenAI was a small nonprofit research lab focused on developing an AI system capable of mimicking a wide range of human tasks. But in the wake of ChatGPT’s astonishing success, the organization has grown and its focus has become increasingly commercial. The company has been rethinking its nonprofit structure, while investors have been increasingly eager to bet billions of dollars on its future.
OpenAI suffered a dramatic boardroom coup last November, with CEO Sam Altman ousted from his position and briefly replaced by Murati. After most staff threatened to resign and following pleas from investors including Microsoft, which had invested billions of dollars in the company, Altman was reinstated with an entirely new board.
In the months that followed, several of OpenAI’s leaders, along with senior engineering figures, stepped away from the company. Ilya Sutskever, one of the company’s earliest hires, the technical brains behind much of its previous work and a board member who voted to oust Altman before backing out, resigned of the company in May.
Sutskever’s departure was followed shortly after by Jan Leike, an engineer who led the long-term AI safety work with Sutskever. John Schulman, the engineer who took the lead on the safety work, resigned In August, Greg Brockman, a co-founder of OpenAI and a board member who backed Altman, said he would take a sabbatical from the company until the end of the year.
Several former OpenAI executives and researchers have gone on to create AI startups. Notably, Sutskever launched Safe Superintelligence this year, which focuses on developing safe AI. Former OpenAI research chief Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela founded Anthropic in 2021, now one of the company’s main rivals for customers.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.