Mira Murati left her post as chief technology officer of OpenAI on Wednesday, the latest in a long list of high-profile departures from the company. Ms. Murati’s decision comes after six years at the artificial intelligence pioneer behind ChatGPT.

In a post on X, Ms. Murati described her time at OpenAI as “an extraordinary privilege” and her decision to leave as “difficult.” “There’s never an ideal time to leave a place you value, but the moment feels right. I want to create the time and space to do my explorations,” she said.

I shared the following note with the OpenAI team today. pic.twitter.com/nsZ4khI06P

— Mira Murati (@miramurati) 25 September 2024

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded with a touching tribute to X, thanking her for her contributions and expressing his support. “It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to all of us personally,” the CEO wrote. “I feel tremendous gratitude to her for what she has helped us build and achieve.”

He said he was “excited to see what she does next.”

I replied: Mira, thank you for everything.

It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and all of us personally.

I feel enormous gratitude to her for what we have been able to build and achieve thanks to her help, but above all I feel personal gratitude…

— Sam Altman (@sama) 25 September 2024

Mira Murati, 35, played a key role in developing ChatGPT and oversaw the release of image generator Dall-E and AI code generator Codex. Her departure comes after her brief tenure as interim CEO following the firing of Mr Altman last November.

To ensure a smooth transition, Sam Altman announced the appointment of Mark Chen as Senior VP of Research and Josh Achiam as Director of Mission Alignment.

Mira Murati’s departure follows that of co-founders Greg Brockman (on an extended leave of absence) and John Schulman (who moved to competitor Anthropic), as well as a product team lead and former Meta employee. Earlier this year, co-founder Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI following a board dispute. With Ms. Murati’s departure, only two of the 11 founders remain.

The restructuring comes as OpenAI releases its new Strawberry AI model, designed to improve “thinking” in generative AI chatbots. The company aims to tackle “hallucinations” – convincing but false content – and provide more accurate answers.