OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati posted on X on Wednesday saying she is leaving the company. Murati said she is stepping away to do her own exploration, after over six years at the AI startup.
“After much reflection, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she said in the post. “There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right.”
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment further, directing TechCrunch to Murati’s tweet.
CEO Sam Altman responded to Murati’s tweet by thanking her in another post.
“We’ll say more about the transition plans soon, but for now, I want to take a moment to just feel thanks,” said Altman.
The decision comes just a week before OpenAI’s DevDay, its annual developer conference.
When Altman was abruptly fired late last year by OpenAI’s previous board of directors, the board briefly installed Murati as interim CEO. Murati was reportedly among those, along with ex-OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who approached the rest of the board prior to Altman’s ouster to express concerns about his behavior.
Altman is increasingly asserting control over OpenAI and its image. On Monday, he penned a blog post asserting that, among other hyperboles, OpenAI could achieve “superintelligence” in the next few years. Altman is also poised to receive equity in OpenAI for the first time as the company reportedly prepares to moves away from its unique nonprofit structure.
Murati came to OpenAI in 2018 as VP of applied AI and partnerships. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, she led the company’s work on the viral AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E and the code-generating system Codex, which powers GitHub’s Copilot product.
Murati, who has a degree in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth College, previously worked as an intern at Goldman Sachs and then at Zodiac Aerospace, the French aerospace group. She spent three years at Tesla as a senior product manager of the Model X, the automaker’s crossover SUV, during which Tesla released early versions of Autopilot, its AI-enabled driver-assistance software.
In 2016, Murati joined Leap Motion, a startup building hand- and finger-tracking motion sensors for PCs, as VP of product and engineering. Murati wanted to make the experience of interacting with a computer “as intuitive as playing with a ball,” she told Fast Company in an interview. But she soon realized that the tech, which relied on a VR headset, was too early.
Murati is the latest high-level exec to depart OpenAI in recent months. Sutskever and former safety leader Jan Leike announced their departures in May, and co-founder John Schulman said last month that he was leaving to join rival Anthropic. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, is on extended leave through the end of the year.
Murati’s decision to step down comes as OpenAI is said to be pursuing a funding round that would value the company at over $150 billion. Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, and Thrive Capital are reportedly in talks to invest; the round could end up being as large as $6.5 billion, per Bloomberg and others.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
