OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati quits

The chief technology officer of OpenAI has announced she is leaving the ChatGPT maker.
Mira Murati, 35, has been part of OpenAI for more than six years and recently launched o1, a new AI model which she claims displays human-like reasoning.
“I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” Murati told colleagues and shared in a post on X.
She added: “There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right.
“Our recent releases of speech-to-speech and [latest model] OpenAI o1 mark the beginning of a new era in interaction and intelligence — achievements made possible by your ingenuity and craftsmanship.”
Murati said that her primary focus would be to “ensure a smooth transition”.
She briefly served as chief executive in November when the board temporarily ousted then reinstated co-founder Sam Altman.
The announcement comes after a reported $6.5 billion fundraising round, which values the company at $150 billion, according to Bloomberg News.
Murati follows other senior OpenAI executives, including founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman, who left the company earlier this year.
Several safety executives have left the business amid concern about the company’s commitment to safety in its models.
In a parting shot when he resigned in May, Jan Leike, a former safety executive at OpenAI said: “Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavour … but over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products.”
OpenAI has said it has boosted its safety work, internal governance and federal government collaboration to keep up with the models’ new capabilities.
“As part of developing these new models, we have come up with a new safety training approach that harnesses their reasoning capabilities to make them adhere to safety and alignment guidelines”, it said in a statement earlier this month.