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OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati is leaving the company.
And within hours, two more OpenAI execs joined the list of high-profile departures, marking another major shake-up for the leading AI company.
After six-and-a-half years at the company, including temporarily serving as its CEO after cofounder Sam Altman was briefly ousted, Murati told employees in a message Wednesday she had “made the difficult decision to leave.”
Read her full memo to staff that she shared online below:
Hi all, I have something to share with you. After much reflection, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAl. My six-and-a-half years with the OpenAl team have been an extraordinary privilege. While I’ll express my gratitude to many individuals in the coming days, I want to start by thanking Sam and Greg for their trust in me to lead the technical organization and for their support throughout the years. There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right. Our recent releases of speech-to-speech and OpenAl o1 mark the beginning of a new era in interaction and intelligence – achievements made possible by your ingenuity and craftsmanship. We didn’t merely build smarter models, we fundamentally changed how Al systems learn and reason through complex problems. We brought safety research from the theoretical realm into practical applications, creating models that are more robust, aligned, and steerable than ever before. Our work has made cutting-edge Al research intuitive and accessible, developing technology that adapts and evolves based on everyone’s input. This success is a testament to our outstanding teamwork, and it is because of your brilliance, your dedication, and your commitment that OpenAl stands at the pinnacle of Al innovation. I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration. For now, my primary focus is doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we’ve built. I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to build and work alongside this remarkable team. Together, we’ve pushed the boundaries of scientific understanding in our quest to improve human well-being. While I may no longer be in the trenches with you, I will still be rooting for you all. With deep gratitude for the friendships forged, the triumphs achieved, and most importantly, the challenges overcome together. Mira
Altman wrote on X that he had thanked Murati in a message to the company.
“It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally,” Altman wrote. “I feel tremendous gratitude towards her for what she has helped us build and accomplish, but I most of all feel personal gratitude towards her for the support and love during all the hard times. I am excited for what she’ll do next.”
Murati hails from Albania and joined OpenAI in 2018 following a previous stint at Tesla. At the AI giant, she oversaw the teams that developed two of its most important products: ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E.
In addition to heading up those major teams, Murati also served as a major public face for OpenAI, appearing in the company’s videos and sitting down for interviews with journalists.
When Altman was abruptly ousted by the company’s board in 2023, The New York Times reported that Murati played a key role, having raised concerns about his leadership style to the board and to Altman directly.
At the time, a lawyer for Murati pushed back, saying she had not approached the board to get Altman fired and was surprised by its decision.
Within hours, news broke that two research executives were also leaving.
Barret Zoph, who had served as the company’s vice president of research, announced on X he was resigning.
“Hey everybody, I have decided to leave OpenAI,” Zoph wrote in his note to OpenAI staff. “This was a very difficult decision as I have has such an incredible time at OpenAI. I got to join right before ChatGPT and helped build the post-training team from scratch with John Schulman and others. I feel so grateful to have gotten the opportunity to run the post-training team and help build and scale ChatGPT to where it is today.”
Soon after, chief research officer Bob McGrew also shared a note that he was resigning, and praised the company’s latest o1 AI model.
“It is time for me to take a break,” he wrote. “There is no better capstone to my work here than shipping o1 to the world.”
Altman thanked the pair in a message shared on X and said Josh Achiam will “take on a new role as Head of Mission Alignment, working across the company to ensure that we get all pieces (and culture) right to be in a place to succeed at the mission.”
Altman also announced Matt Knight would become Chief Information Security Officer, which he said was the “plan for quite some time.”
A stream of top exec departures
The OpenAI exodus began when cofounder Ilya Sutskever left the company in May. He had raised concerns about Altman before he resigned.
Hours after Sutskever’s departure, Jan Leike, co-leader of OpenAI’s superalignment group, announced his resignation.
OpenAI lost more executives in August when president Greg Brockman announced a sabbatical. At the same time, VP of consumer product Peter Deng departed, and cofounder John Schulman left to join rival AI firm Anthropic.
One former researcher at the company, Daniel Kokotajlo, also said OpenAI’s team dedicated to safety had been nearly halved in roughly a year.
The company is seeking to raise funding from the likes of Thrive Capital, Microsoft, and Apple at a staggering $150 billion valuation.
Earlier this month, the company unveiled o1, an AI model designed to “reason” more like humans and to tackle complex problems in science, coding, and math.
It also announced a revamped Safety and Security Committee that does not include Altman.
