Mira Murati, OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer, announced her decision to leave the AI company after over six years of work. In a heartfelt message shared on X (formerly Twitter), Mira Murati revealed her decision to part ways with OpenAI after six-and-a-half years of service.
“After much reflection, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she wrote. “There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right.”
Murati expressed immense gratitude for her time at OpenAI, noting that it had been an “extraordinary privilege.”
Murati’s departure comes just ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference, DevDay. While the company is gearing up for future developments, Murati’s exit leaves a significant void in its leadership team.
CEO Sam Altman, responding to her announcement, publicly acknowledged her contributions. “I feel tremendous gratitude towards her for what she has helped us build and accomplish, but I most of all feel personal gratitude towards her for the support and love during all the hard times.”
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 as the VP of applied AI and partnerships before being promoted to CTO in 2022. During her tenure, she played a pivotal role in the creation of some of the company’s most notable AI tools, including the viral chatbot ChatGPT, the text-to-image generator DALL-E, and Codex, which powers GitHub’s Copilot product. Her leadership and vision helped position OpenAI as a frontrunner in the artificial intelligence revolution.
However, her time at OpenAI wasn’t without controversy. Murati gained attention for her bold predictions and provocative statements about the future of AI. In one interview, she suggested that OpenAI’s AI systems would reach “Ph.D.-level” intelligence.
Additionally, her comments at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live Conference in June, where she claimed that certain creative jobs should not exist if they only produce low-quality content, raised eyebrows. “Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” Murati remarked.
Murati’s departure also follows a period of leadership changes at OpenAI. Earlier this year, Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever and former safety leader Jan Leike announced their exits, and co-founder John Schulman left to join rival AI startup Anthropic. The timing of Murati’s exit, along with these leadership shifts, occurs as OpenAI is reportedly seeking to raise a funding round that could value the company at over $150 billion.
Murati’s career before OpenAI laid a strong foundation for her work in AI. With a degree in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth College, she held roles at Tesla, where she worked on the Model X and early versions of Autopilot, and at Leap Motion, where she led product development for VR technology. Her unique combination of engineering and product management experience has made her a key figure in AI development over the past decade.