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Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer who was instrumental in the development of ChatGPT and the artificial intelligence image generator Dall-E, announced on Wednesday that she will be leaving the company.

“My six and a half years with the OpenAI team have been an extraordinary privilege,” Murati said in a note to the OpenAI team that she posted on X. “There is never an ideal time to leave a place you cherish, but this moment feels right.”

Murati joins a number of executives who have recently left OpenAI. The leadership shakeup comes as the ChatGPT maker tries to navigate a controversial growth path that aims to make it easier to raise investor money and generate revenue, among other things.

The company, which was founded as a nonprofit research lab and has built a for-profit arm, is considering a restructuring that could bring more returns to investors. According to reports from Bloomberg and other media outlets, OpenAI is in talks for a new round of funding that could value the company at $150 billion.

Murati’s departure comes after OpenAI chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever left the company in May to start a new firm dedicated to safer AI. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman left the company in August to join competitor Anthropic. And OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman is also currently on an extended leave of absence.

Murati joined OpenAI’s leadership team in 2018 after working at augmented reality company Ultraleap (then Leap Motion) and Tesla. With the public release of ChatGPT in 2022, Murati helped lead OpenAI as it gained traction in Silicon Valley and beyond, sparking an AI arms race in the tech world.

Last November, she was briefly named interim CEO of OpenAI during the company’s chaotic leadership transition that saw the firing of Sam Altman, but was quickly brought back into the position. During the debacle, Murati, along with more than 500 other OpenAI employees, threatened to quit if Altman wasn’t brought back to the company.

More recently, Murati has been responsible for key technological advancements at the company, including the May release of GPT-4o, the AI ​​model that enabled ChatGPT to have human-like voice conversations, and this month’s preview of OpenAI o1, an AI model that the company says can “think logically” to solve more difficult scientific and mathematical problems.

“Our recent releases of Speech-to-Speech and OpenAI o1 mark the beginning of a new era of interaction and intelligence… We have not only built smarter models, we have fundamentally changed how AI systems learn and tackle complex problems,” Murati said in the statement announcing her departure.

Murati said she is leaving OpenAI to “create time and space for my own explorations,” but she will assist with the leadership transition.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a question about the timeline for her official departure from the company or when a new CTO would be announced.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to Murati’s X-post with one of his own, saying, “It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to all of us personally.”

“I am deeply grateful to her for what she has helped us build and achieve, but most of all I feel personal gratitude for her support and love during all the difficult times. I am excited to see what she does next,” Altman said, adding that the company will share more about the leadership transition plan soon.

This story has been updated with additional details and context.