Jonathan Lachman, former head of special projects at OpenAI, recently left to join a fresh artificial intelligence research lab founded by former OpenAI director Mira Murati, according to two people familiar with the discussions. This is Murati’s most high-profile hire since leaving OpenAI last September to launch a high-profile venture focused on researching so-called artificial general intelligence.
Murati hired a total of about 10 researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Character AI and Google DeepMind. Her startup is still in its early stages – it has no name or specific direction for product development, according to two people familiar with the company.
Murati and Lachman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. An OpenAI spokesman confirmed Lachman’s departure.
Murati left OpenAI less than a year after the company’s board abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman in overdue 2023. In the confusion that followed, the board briefly appointed Murati, who was then serving as the company’s chief technology officer, as interim CEO.
The move was a blow to Altman. “I thought it was a really bad feeling.” he told podcaster Lex Fridman last March. He described Murati’s promotion as the “lowest point” of a dramatic leadership crisis that briefly engulfed OpenAI. Less than a week later, after more than 730 OpenAI employees threatened to quit, Altman was reinstated as CEO.
After the incident, Altman and Murati continued to work closely at OpenAI. “She did a great job on what was a very chaotic weekend,” Altman told Fridman on the podcast. When Murati left the company 10 months later, she thanked Altman in her farewell letter.
“There is never a perfect time to leave a place you love,” she wrote in a note to OpenAI employees that she later forwarded published in October. She added that she was “leaving because I want to create time and space for my own exploration.” A month later Reuters reported that Murati was trying to raise more than $100 million to fund the mysterious fresh company, although that number has yet to be finalized.
OpenAI’s vice president of research Barret Zoph and chief research officer Bob McGrew left around the same time as Murati. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, he followed in their footsteps in May last year. He then founded Unthreatening Superintelligence, an artificial intelligence security startup. Within three months, Sutskever’s startup did just that raised $1 billion. Anthropic, OpenAI’s main competitor, was also founded by former OpenAI executives and has raised billions of dollars in funding, including $8 billion from Amazon.