OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati to Leave Company

OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said Wednesday (Sept. 25) that she is leaving the company after 6½ years.

“I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” Murati said in a Wednesday post on X. “For now, my primary focus is doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we’ve built.”

Murati served as interim CEO of OpenAI for a time in November 2023 when OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted from the company by its board.

When announcing that move, the company said: “[Murati] brings a unique skill set, understanding of the company’s values, operations and business, and already leads the company’s research, product and safety functions.”

Three other executives have left the artificial intelligence (AI) firm in recent months.

John Schulman, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, said in August that he was departing the company to join one of its competitors, Anthropic.

“This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work,” Schulman said at the time. “I’ve decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I’m most interested in.”

In May, Ilya Sutskever, who was OpenAI’s lead scientist and co-founder and who took part in the unsuccessful effort to remove Altman in 2023, announced his resignation from the firm.

“After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI,” Sutskever said at the time. “The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI [artificial general intelligence] that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of [Altman, President Greg Brockman and Murati].”

Jan Leike, who co-led OpenAI’s superalignment team, which focused on “scientific and technical breakthroughs to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us,” per the company, also left OpenAI in May and joined Anthropic.

Murati’s announcement comes at a time when OpenAI is reportedly aiming to raise $6.5 billion at a $150 billion valuation.