Mira Murati, OpenAI's technology chief, becomes the latest exec to leave the company

OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati — who has been instrumental in the development of ChatGPT and the artificial intelligence image generator Dall-E — said Wednesday she is leaving the company.

OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati — who has been instrumental in the development of ChatGPT and the artificial intelligence image generator Dall-E — said Wednesday she is 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, which she posted to X. "There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right."

Murati joins a string of executives who have recently left OpenAI. The leadership shakeup comes as the ChatGPT-maker attempts to forge a controversial path to growth, including making it easier to raise funds from investors and generate revenue.

The company, which was created as a non-profit research lab and built a for-profit arm, has been mulling a restructuring that could lead to more returns for investors. OpenAI is reportedly in talks about a new fundraising round that could value the firm at US$150 billion, Bloomberg and others have reported.

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

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

Last November, she was briefly elevated to interim CEO of OpenAI during the company’s chaotic leadership upheaval, which saw Sam Altman ousted, then quickly restored to the role. During the debacle, Murati joined more than 500 fellow OpenAI employees in threatening to quit if Altman was not brought back to the company.