On Wednesday, Mira Murati, Chief Technical Officer of OpenAI, surprisingly announced her departure from the company. The resignation was shared on the social network X. Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 and held various leadership positions for six and a half years, most recently that of CTO.

“After much consideration, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she wrote in a letter to the company’s employees. “While I will express my gratitude to many individuals in the coming days, I first want to thank Sam and Greg for their trust in me to lead the technical organization and for their support over the years,” she continued, referring to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman. “There is never an ideal time to leave a place you value, but this moment feels right.”

At OpenAI, Murati was responsible for the company’s technical strategy and product development, including the launch and improvement of DALL-E, Codex, Sora, and the ChatGPT platform, and also led research and security teams. In public appearances, Murati often spoke about ethical considerations in AI development.

Murati’s decision to leave the company comes as OpenAI is at a major inflection point and plans to change its nonprofit structure. According to a Reuters report published today, OpenAI is working to convert its core business into a nonprofit corporation and remove control from the nonprofit board. The move, which would give CEO Sam Altman equity in the company for the first time, could potentially value OpenAI at $150 billion.

Murati said her decision to leave was driven by a desire to “create time and space for my own exploration,” but she did not elaborate on her future plans.

Proud of safety and research

In her farewell announcement, Murati highlighted recent developments at OpenAI, including innovations in speech recognition technology and the release of OpenAI o1. She cited what she said were the company’s advances in security research and the development of “more robust, tuned and tractable” AI models.

Altman responded directly to Murati’s tweet, expressing gratitude for Murati’s contributions and personal support during difficult times, likely referring to the turbulent period in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board briefly fired Altman from the company.

“It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to all of us personally,” he wrote. “I have tremendous gratitude to her for what she helped us build and achieve, but most of all I have personal gratitude to her for the support and love during all the tough times. I’m excited to see what she does next.”

Not the first major player to leave

With Murati’s departure, Altman remains one of the few long-serving executives at OpenAI, which has seen significant restructuring in the upper ranks in recent years. In May 2024, former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left the company to start his own company, Safe Superintelligence, Inc. (SSI), which focuses on building AI systems that are far superior to humans in their reasoning abilities. That came just six months after Sutskever was involved in temporarily removing Altman as CEO.

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman left the company in early 2024 to join rival AI company Anthropic, and in August OpenAI President Greg Brockman announced he would take a temporary sabbatical until the end of the year.

The leadership shakeups have raised questions among critics about the internal dynamics at OpenAI under Altman and the state of OpenAI’s future research direction, which aims to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a hypothetical technology that could potentially perform human-level mental work.

“Question: Why would key people leave an organization just before it is in the middle of developing AGI?” asked xAI developer Benjamin De Kraker in a post on X shortly after Murati’s announcement. “That’s like leaving NASA months before the moon landing,” he wrote in a response. “Wouldn’t you want to stay and be a part of it?”

Altman mentioned that more information on transition plans would follow. However, it remains unclear who will take over Murati’s role and how OpenAI will adapt to this latest leadership change, as the company is on the verge of adopting a corporate structure that may put more power directly under Altman. “We’ll have more to say on transition plans soon, but for now I want to take a moment to simply feel gratitude,” Altman wrote.