OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announces she is leaving the company

Mira Murati, chief technology officer of OpenAI, announced on Wednesday that she is leaving the company after six and a half years.

“After careful consideration, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she wrote in a memo to the company, which she also posted on social media site X, adding, “There is never an ideal time to leave a place you value, but this moment feels right.”

Murati is the latest high-ranking executive to leave the startup. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and former security chief Jan Leike announced their departures in May. Co-founder John Schulman said last month that he was leaving to join competitor Anthropic.

Murati also wrote that she is “stepping back because I want to create time and space for my own exploration. Right now, my main focus is doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the momentum we have built.”

Shortly after Murati announced her departure, Reuters reported that OpenAI plans to restructure into a for-profit company that will no longer be governed by a nonprofit board. The company will retain its nonprofit arm, according to Reuters.

OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT and SearchGPT, is currently seeking a funding round that would value the company at more than $150 billion, according to sources familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified as details of the round have not been made public. Thrive Capital is leading the round and plans to invest $1 billion, and Tiger Global also plans to join. Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple are also reportedly in talks to invest.

While OpenAI has been in hypergrowth mode since late 2022, when it launched ChatGPT, it has also been marked by controversy and the departure of senior staff, with some current and former employees concerned that the company is growing too quickly to operate safely.

Murati caused a stir in June when she told an audience at the Wall Street Journal's WSJ Tech Live conference that new artificial intelligence tools would likely lead to the disappearance of some creative jobs.

“Some creative jobs may disappear, but maybe they shouldn't have existed in the first place if the content that comes out of them isn't very high quality,” Murati said in an interview on stage, adding: “I really believe that using it as a tool for education (and) creativity will expand our intelligence, creativity and imagination.”

Murati became a household name when OpenAI's board abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman last November and named Murati interim CEO.

OpenAI's board said in a statement at the time that Altman had “not been consistently candid in his communications with the board.” The Wall Street Journal and other media reported that Sutskever had focused on ensuring AI did not harm people, while others, including Altman, were instead more eager to push for deployment of new technologies.

Nearly all of OpenAI's employees had signed an open letter declaring they were leaving the company in response to the board's decision. Days later, Altman was back at the company and Murati returned to her previous role as CTO. Board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley were out. Sutskever was removed from the board but remained an employee at the time.