At the heart of Silicon Valley’s AI innovation lies OpenAI, a company that has made headlines for its advancements and, more recently with a wave of leadership exits. Recently, the Microsoft-backed OpenAI, three of its senior leaders announced their resignations from the company. This includes Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, and VP of Research Barret Zoph.
This resignation by the key individuals in the company comes at a critical time as the company is in the middle of negotiating a USD 6.5 billion funding round that could value it at USD 150 billion.
Mira Murati’s Exit
Mira Murati, who has been with OpenAI for over six years and briefly served as interim CEO during last year’s leadership crisis, took to the social media platform X, formerly Twitter to explain her decision to leave.
In her post she wrote, "I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration."
Since joining as VP of Applied AI and Partnerships in 2020, Murati was promoted to CTO in May 2022. Under her leadership, OpenAI launched the highly anticipated GPT-4o model, which introduced voice conversations.
In 2023, during a leadership crisis in the company and when CEO Sam Altman was ousted, Murati also stepped in as interim CEO.
Apart of this, it is interesting to note that this wave of resignation in the company is not the first in 2024. Earlier, in August, co-founder John Schulman left to join Anthropic, a rival AI company, while another co-founder, Greg Brockman, announced a sabbatical. Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, who was responsible for OpenAI’s AI safety initiatives, also departed in May to start his own AI venture.
Sam Altman’s Response
Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, in response to the unexpected nature of the leadership changes in a post on X, wrote “Leadership changes are a natural part of companies, especially companies that grow so quickly and are so demanding. I obviously won’t pretend it’s natural for this one to be so abrupt, but we are not a normal company, and I think the reasons Mira explained to me (there is never a good time, anything not abrupt would have leaked, and she wanted to do this while OpenAI was in an upswing) make sense. We can both talk about this more tomorrow during all-hands.”
Despite the high-profile exits, OpenAI is wasting no time in announcing new appointments. Altman has already promoted several individuals to key leadership roles. Knight will take over as Chief Information Security Officer, Josh Achiam as Head of Mission Alignment, and Mark Chen as Senior Vice President of Research.
“Mark, Jakub, Kevin, Srinivas, Matt, and Josh will report to me. I have over the past year or so spent most of my time on the non-technical parts of our organization; I am now looking forward to spending most of my time on the technical and product parts of the company,” he wrote in his X post.
