2024-09-27
On September 26, 2024, Mira Murati, the
Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, has announced her departure from the
company. After six years with OpenAI, Murati stated that she is stepping away
to explore new opportunities. Her departure comes amid a period of significant
restructuring at OpenAI, which is transitioning to a for-profit model.
Mira Murati
played a key role in the launch of the company's flagship products such as
ChatGPT and DALL-E.
Murati’s exit follows the recent
departures of other high-level executives, including Ilya Sutskever and Jan
Leike. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, expressed his gratitude for Murati’s
contributions and mentioned that more details about the leadership transition
will be shared soon.
In December 2015, OpenAI was founded
by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell,
Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and
Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk as the co-chairs. Today, only Sam Altman and Wojciech Zaremba remain as
original co-founders of OpenAI.
OpenAI is planning to restructure the company into for-profit and public benefit corporation that will no longer be controlled by its non-profit board. The OpenAI non-profit will exist and own a minority stake in the for-profit company.
OpenAI is currently discussing giving
CEO Sam Altman a 7% equity stake in the company as part of its transition to a
for-profit model making him receive equity for the first time.
This move marks a significant shift for
OpenAI, which was originally founded as a nonprofit research organization with
the goal of developing safe and beneficial AI for humanity.
The potential equity stake for Altman
is part of broader restructuring efforts at OpenAI, which have also seen the
departure of several high-level executives, including CTO Mira Murati. This
transition is still under discussion, and the final details have yet to be
confirmed.
