OpenAI CTO Mira Murati departs, and two top research execs follow

OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said Wednesday that she’s leaving the company after six and a half years.

Later in the day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said research chief Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph, a research vice president, are also departing, as the high-valued artificial intelligence startup continues to lose top talent.

Murati wrote in a memo to the company that she’s “stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” She said her focus will be on ensuring a “smooth transition.”

“After much reflection, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she wrote in the memo, which she also published on social media site X. “There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right.”

Altman wrote in a late afternoon post on X that McGrew and Zoph were leaving, and that their decisions were independent of each other.

“The timing of Mira’s decision was such that it made sense to now do this all at once, so that we can work together for a smooth handover to the next generation of leadership,” Altman wrote.

They’re the latest high-level executive to depart OpenAI, which has exploded in popularity and value since releasing the ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and former safety leader Jan Leike announced their departures in May. Co-founder John Schulman said last month that he was leaving to join rival Anthropic.

Shortly after Murati’s announcement on Wednesday, Reuters said OpenAI is planning to restructure to a for-profit business that no longer reports to a non-profit board. The company will retain its non-profit segment, according to Reuters.

OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, is currently pursuing a funding round that would value the company at more than $150 billion, according to sources familiar with the situation who asked to not be named because details of the round have not been made public. Thrive Capital is leading the round and plans to invest $1 billion, and Tiger Global is planning to join as well.

Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple are reportedly also in talks to invest.

While OpenAI has been in hyper-growth mode since late 2022, it’s been simultaneously riddled with controversy and executive departures, with some current and former employees concerned that the company is growing too quickly to operate safely.

Murati became a well-known name when OpenAI’s board abruptly ousted Altman last November and Murati was named 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 outlets reported that Sutskever trained his focus on ensuring that AI would not harm humans, while others, including Altman, were instead more eager to push ahead with delivering new technology.

Almost all of OpenAI’s employees had signed an open letter saying they would leave in response to the board’s action. Days later, Altman was back at the company and Murati moved back to her former 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.

Murati raised eyebrows in June, telling an audience at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference that new artificial intelligence tools will likely lead to the disappearance of some creative jobs.

“Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place if the content that comes out of it is not very high quality,” Murati said in an on-stage interview, adding, “I really believe that using it as a tool for education [and] creativity will expand our intelligence and creativity and imagination.”

McGrew wrote in a departing post on Wednesday that, since joining “the small non-profit” in January 2017, OpenAI has “become the most important research and deployment company in the world.” He said he’s taking a break, and that Mark Chen will lead the research team.

In a post on X, Zoph called it a “natural point for me to explore new opportunities outside of OpenAI.” He added that the “post-training team has many talented leaders and is being left in good hands.”