OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati resigned on Wednesday, saying she wanted “time and space to explore on my own.” Murati was one of three executives at the top of the company behind ChatGPT and briefly led the company last year as board members grappled with the fate of CEO Sam Altman.
“There is never a perfect time to walk away from a place you value, but this time feels right,” she wrote in a message to OpenAI employees, published on X.
Altman responded to Murati’s post on X, writing that “it’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to all of us personally,” adding that he feels “personal gratitude to her for her support and love during difficult times.”
A successor was not immediately announced.
Murati, through a personal spokesman, declined to comment further. OpenAI also declined to comment, referring to questions about Murati’s tweet.
Murati previously worked at Tesla and Leap Motion before joining OpenAI in 2018. At the time, OpenAI was a miniature nonprofit research lab focused on developing an AI system capable of replicating a wide range of human tasks. But as ChatGPT grew in popularity, the organization became increasingly commercially focused, rethinking its nonprofit structure and investors increasingly betting billions of dollars on its future.
Murati came to OpenAI with the belief that AI “will be the most important set of technologies that humanity has ever created,” she said. Fortune last year“The mission of OpenAI really spoke to me, to create technology that benefits people.”
OpenAI was rocked by a dramatic boardroom coup last November that saw CEO Sam Altman ousted and briefly replaced by Murati. After much of the staff threatened to resign and pleas from investors including Microsoft, which poured billions into the company, Altman was reinstated with an entirely recent board.
In the months that followed, several members of OpenAI’s management team left the company, as did senior engineering figures. Ilya Sutskever—one of the company’s earliest employees, the technical mastermind behind much of its earlier work, and a board member who voted to oust Altman before recusing himself—resigned from the company in May.
Sutskever’s departure was It happened shortly afterwards by Jan Leike, the engineer who led the long-term AI security work at Sutskever. John Schulman, the engineer who took over the security work, he went down in August. In August, Greg Brockman, an OpenAI co-founder and board member who stood by Altman, said he was taking a leave of absence from the company until the end of the year.
Many former OpenAI executives and researchers have gone on to found recent AI companies. Notably, Sutskever this year launched Safe and sound Superintelligence, which focuses on developing safe and sound AI. Former OpenAI research chief Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela founded Anthropic in 2021, now one of the company’s main rivals for customers.
According to a source familiar with the situation, Murati’s final day at OpenAI has not yet been determined. Talks are ongoing with OpenAI management to ensure a silky transition to the recent position.