In a significant leadership shake-up, OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, VP of Research Barret Zoph, and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew announced their departures via X on Wednesday. This move adds to a series of executive changes at the Microsoft-backed AI pioneer, raising questions about its future direction during the transition.
As per the LinkedIn profile, Mira Murati joined OpenAI as the “VP of Applied AI and Partnerships” in December 2020 and was promoted to CTO in May 2022. Before her time at OpenAI, she worked at the virtual and augmented reality startup Leap Motion and at Tesla.
As CTO, Murati often shared the spotlight with Sam Altman, notably leading the presentation for the launch of the GPT-4o model in May, which introduced realistic voice conversations.
“I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my exploration.”
Her departure comes as OpenAI navigates the rapidly changing landscape of artificial intelligence, indicating that her ambitions may have shifted away from the company’s current direction.
For San Francisco-based OpenAI, which began as a nonprofit research laboratory and is best known for creating ChatGPT, these departures feel significant.
Aside from Murati, McGrew, and Zoph, OpenAI has seen a wave of departures recently. President and co-founder Greg Brockman announced in August that he was “taking a sabbatical” through the end of the year.
Another co-founder, John Schulman, left for rival Anthropic, which was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI leaders. Chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has also departed, marking a significant turning point for the company.
Murati leaves a positive impression on the company and OpenAI’s CEO Altman also shared a departing note on X saying “It’s very hard to leave a place you love”. He praised her work and said “Leadership changes” are a part of the company.
By announcing six other people joining the company Altman said in a post on X:
“I obviously won’t pretend it’s natural for this one to be so abrupt, but we are not a normal company.”
As OpenAI undergoes this leadership transition, the roles of newcomers will be pivotal in shaping the company’s future direction and strategies in the evolving AI landscape. Stay tuned with AIChief for updates on how these changes will impact the innovative journey of OpenAI.
