Mira Murati, the Chief Technology Officer of Artificial Intelligence firm OpenAI, said in a post on X that she is resigning from the company. The former Goldman Sachs and Tesla employee announced her decision in a note to the company, which she also shared on her X profile Wednesday.
In the note, the 35-year-old said that she is leaving the company to "create space and time" for her "own exploration." However, she did not mention explicitly what that might be.
"I'm stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration," Murati wrote in the note. "For now, my primary focus is doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we've built."
I shared the following note with the OpenAI team today. pic.twitter.com/nsZ4khI06P
— Mira Murati (@miramurati) September 25, 2024
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 and played a pivotal role in propelling the company to the top of the AI race with the development and launch of ChatGPT and the image generation application, DALL-E. She has also served as the company's interim CEO for a brief period in 2022 after Sam Altman was forced out of the company.
Till recently, she played a key role in OpenAI's new product offerings, namely the upgraded free-to-use GPT model GPT4o, as well as its latest launch, OpenAI o1.
"We didn't merely build smarter models, we fundamentally changed how AI systems learn and reason through complex problems," she wrote in her note, reflecting on the work she did at OpenAI. "We brought safety research from the theoretical realm into practical applications, creating models that are more robust, aligned, and steerable than ever before."
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, commented on Murati's post, thanking her "for everything."
"It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally," Altman said. "I feel tremendous gratitude towards her for what she has helped us build and accomplish, but I most of all feel personal gratitude towards her for the support and love during all the hard times. I am excited for what she’ll do next."
I replied with this. Mira, thank you for everything.It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally.I feel tremendous gratitude towards her for what she has helped us build and accomplish, but I most of all feel personal…
— Sam Altman (@sama) September 25, 2024
Altman did not announce Murati's replacement immediately, but said the plans will be announced soon.