OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announced her departure from the company last week. According to her, she decided to “free up time and space for her own research.” Immediately after Murati’s dismissal, several large venture capital firms announced their desire to finance her next project. The intrigue is that Murati has not yet made any statements about her future plans and refused to comment on the rumors that arose.
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«My six and a half years on the OpenAI team have been an exceptional privilege… There is never a perfect time to leave a place you cherish, but this moment feels right,” Murati wrote on her social media account X.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman commented on Murati’s sudden departure from X: “I certainly won’t pretend that the suddenness [of the departure] is natural, but we are not an ordinary company, and I think the reasons that Mira explained to me , make sense.”
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018. Before that, she worked on the design of the Model X electric car at Tesla. At OpenAI, Murati led the development of two of the company’s flagship products, ChatGPT and Dall-E.
Murati’s departure comes as OpenAI is restructuring from a non-profit organization to a commercial one, which will give Altman the opportunity to take an equity stake. Another recent fundraising brought OpenAI investments of $6.5 billion from companies such as Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Coatue and Microsoft.
Venture capitalists are competing to be the first investors in startups founded by OpenAI people, as all of these projects look very promising. Dozens of former OpenAI employees, including the startup’s co-founders who left, have founded their own companies over the past few years, including:
- Ilya Sutskever has raised $1 billion for his AI research lab Safe Superintelligence.
- Andrej Karpathy founded Eureka Labs, focused on applying AI in education.
- AI startup Anthropic was created by Dario Amodei and a team of researchers from OpenAI.
- Aravind Srinivas founded the artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity.
At the same time as Murati, two more technical specialists announced their departure from OpenAI – chief scientist Bob McGrew and vice president of research Barrett Zoph. Now Altman and Wojciech Zaremba are the only remaining founders of the company’s eleven founders.
«Their passing made me think about the difficulties that parents faced in the Middle Ages, when 6 out of 8 children died prematurely,” Zaremba wrote in a post on the social network X that went viral. “Despite the bereavement, the parents had to come to terms with it and find deep joy and satisfaction in the two who survived.”