Three top technical leaders at Microsoft-backed OpenAI quit on Wednesday, the latest in a string of executive departures this year coming at a time of flux for the ChatGPT maker.
Chief technology officer Mira Murati, vice president of research Barret Zoph and chief research officer Bob McGrew all announced their departures via X on Wednesday afternoon.
The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence start-up is negotiating a new, US$6.5-billion financing round valuing the company at $150-billion, contingent on the company upending its corporate structure.
The company plans to restructure to a for-profit benefit corporation and will give CEO Sam Altman an equity stake. Currently, a non-profit board controls the for-profit entity, an unusual structure which led to members of the non-profit board ousting Altman in November 2023 over a breakdown in communication and loss of trust. He was reinstated after five days.
The funding round has not closed yet and the company is in the process of finalising it.
It was unclear whether the executives’ departure could affect the ongoing fundraise. Some fundraising documents contain a “material adverse change” clause which allows investors to withdraw from a deal if the company encounters anything that could have a significant negative impact.
Murati is still working at OpenAI while she negotiates her exit from the company, according to a source close to her. She has been part of the ChatGPT maker for six-and-a-half years, and briefly served as CEO in November when the board temporarily axed Altman.
Public face
According to her LinkedIn profile, Murati joined OpenAI as the “VP of applied AI and partnerships” in December 2020 and was promoted to CTO in May 2022. Prior to OpenAI, she worked at virtual and augmented reality start-up Leap Motion and at Tesla.
As CTO, Murati frequently appeared alongside Altman as the public face of the ChatGPT maker. When OpenAI launched its GPT-4o model in May, capable of having realistic voice conversation, Murati led the presentation.
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“I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” Murati wrote a post on X.
Murati, Zoph and McGrew are the latest in a string of OpenAI executive departures. In August, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman said on X that he had joined rival AI company Anthropic and another co-founder, Greg Brockman, also said on X he was taking a sabbatical through the end of the year. A third co-founder, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, left OpenAI in May.
On X, Altman said Murati did not inform him in advance of her departure, explaining to him that she wanted to do it when the company was in an upswing and that “there is never a good time”. In the same post, Altman also announced a slew of internal promotions: Matt Knight to chief information security officer, Josh Achiam to head of mission alignment and Mark Chen to senior vice president of research. — Anna Tong and Harshita Mary Varghese, (c) 2024 Reuters
