Home Tech Mira Murati’s AI Startup Makes First Hires, Including Former OpenAI Executive

Mira Murati’s AI Startup Makes First Hires, Including Former OpenAI Executive

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Mira Murati's AI Startup Makes First Hires, Including Former OpenAI Executive

Jonathan Lachman, OpenAI’s former head of special projects, recently left to join a new artificial intelligence research lab founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, according to two people familiar with the discussions. It is the most notable hire Murati has made since he left OpenAI in September last year to start the much-hyped company, which focuses on exploring so-called artificial general intelligence.

Murati has poached approximately 10 researchers and engineers in total so far from competitors such as OpenAI, Character AI, and Google DeepMind. His startup is still in its early stages: It has no name or a firm product direction, according to two people familiar with the company.

Murati and Lachman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed Lachman’s departure.

Murati left OpenAI less than a year after CEO Sam Altman was abruptly fired by the company’s board of directors in late 2023. In the turmoil that followed, the board briefly appointed Murati, who was then serving as director of technology company, as interim CEO.

The move was a blow to Altman. “I thought that feels really bad.” he told podcaster Lex Fridman last March.. He described Murati’s promotion as “the nadir” of the dramatic leadership crisis that briefly consumed OpenAI. Less than a week later and after more than 730 OpenAI employees threatened to resign, Altman was reinstated as CEO.

Altman and Murati continued to work closely at OpenAI after the incident. “He did a great job that weekend amidst a lot of chaos,” Altman told Fridman on the podcast. When Murati left the company 10 months later, he thanked Altman in his farewell letter.

“There is never an ideal time to walk away from a place you love,” he wrote in the note to OpenAI employees, who later published in X. He added that he was “stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” One month later, Reuters reported that Murati was trying to raise more than $100 million to finance a mysterious new company, although that figure had not been finalized.

OpenAI’s vice president of research, Barret Zoph, and director of research, Bob McGrew, left around the same time as Murati. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, did the same in May of last year. He then founded Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on AI security. Within three months, Sutskever’s startup had raised a billion dollars. Anthropic, a major OpenAI competitor, was also founded by former OpenAI executives and has raised billions of dollars in funding, including $8 billion from Amazon.

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