Mira Murati announced on Wednesday that she was leaving OpenAI, where she had served as chief technology officer and interim CEO after Sam Altman was temporarily fired in November.
Her departure sent shockwaves throughout the tech industry — Bloomberg reported that employees reacted to the news with “whatever” emojis on Slack — and sparked speculation about why X is leaving and where she might go next.
And, of course, there have been social media memes poking fun at some of the celebrity retirements that have taken place this year.
One VC joked that OpenAI has no C-suite executives.
Others pointed to a 2023 Wired magazine cover featuring Altman, Murati, former chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and the company’s president and co-founder Greg Brockman. At the time, Wired called OpenAI’s executives the world’s “AI rulers.”
Of the four, only Altman and Brockman remain with the company, with Brockman on sabbatical until the end of the year.
Sutskever announced in May that he was leaving OpenAI to start his own safety-focused AI startup.
Meanwhile, cynicism towards X has reached critical mass.
OpenAI will reach its final form when its only employees are Sam and the AGI itself.
— Madeline (@madsmacartney) September 25, 2024
Hours after Murati announced his departure, two other departures from OpenAi were announced on X: Bob McGrew, the company’s chief research officer, and Barrett Zoff, vice president of research.
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Remaining on the leadership team are CFO Sarah Friar, chief scientific officer Jakub Pachocki, who replaced Sutskever, chief operating officer Brad Lightcap and chief product officer Kevin Weil.
Of OpenAI’s 11 co-founders in 2015, only three remain: Altman, Brockman (also on leave), and Wojciech Zaremba.
One of the company’s co-founders, Elon Musk, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, which he dropped but then reinstated in August, claiming he had helped found the nonprofit but was “scammed.”
In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI told Business Insider in an August statement: “As we noted with respect to Elon’s original lawsuit allegations, which have since been withdrawn, Elon’s prior emails still speak for themselves.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to BI’s request for comment on McGrew and Zoff’s departures.
The brain drain has included other high-profile departures, such as former researcher and coordinating director Jan Rijke, who announced his resignation in May, shortly after Sutskever.
Daniel Kokotajiro and William Sanders, who previously worked on OpenAI’s governance and safety teams, respectively, will leave OpenAI in the first half of 2023.
Additionally, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman left in August to join rival Antropic, where Reicke joined, and another co-founder, Andrei Karpathy, left in February 2024.
Kokotajiro said in August that about half of the people who were focused on AI safety had left the company.
“This isn’t a coordinated thing,” he told Fortune magazine. “I just think it’s people individually giving up.”
Founded in 2015, OpenAI has been taking a leading position in the AI race since it released ChatGPT in late November 2022. The company has since released more sophisticated versions of ChatGPT, a text-to-image model called DALL-E, and GPT 4o. The startup also unveiled a voice assistant, a text-to-video model called Sora, and its most sophisticated AI model with inference capabilities, o1.
But rivals, including OpenAI investors like Microsoft, are catching up. Meta announced on Wednesday that Meta AI is on track to become “the world’s most used AI assistant.”
OpenAI’s latest funding round, which would value the company at $150 billion, is nearing completion and could include participation from investors including Apple and Nvidia, according to Bloomberg.
Altman also could stand to receive a large salary from a corporate restructuring that would see the startup move away from its current non-profit status, according to Reuters and Bloomberg.
