On Wednesday afternoon, there was a shakeup at OpenAI, the manufacturer of the ChatGPT artificial intelligence conversation platform. The company’s Technical Director, Mira Murati, resigned, and both the Chief Research Officer, Bob McGrew, and the Vice President of Research, Barret Zoph, also left the company.
After working at OpenAI for six and a half years, Murati announced her resignation statement to the employees of the top artificial intelligence company through the social media platform X.
In her statement, she said, “After much deliberation, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” and added, “I am stepping down because I want to make time and space for my own exploration.”
OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, replied to Murati’s post, thanking her and mentioning that the company would soon provide more information about the transition plan.
Hours later, Altman announced on the X platform that the Chief Research Officer McGrew and Vice President of Research Zoph had also resigned.
Altman stated that the departure of these three executives was amicable and independent.
Altman mentioned in his post, “Given the timing of Murati’s decision, it makes sense to complete this restructuring all at once so we can work together smoothly to pass on leadership to the next generation.”
Meanwhile, Altman appointed new leadership within the company, including Mark Chen as Vice President of Research and Matt Knight as Chief Information Security Officer.
Altman expressed that he had spent most of the past year focusing on the non-technical aspects of the company but planned to shift his focus to the technical and production side.
“For most companies, changes in leadership are natural, especially for a company that is growing so rapidly and demanding so much,” Altman wrote on X. “But I will not pretend that this sudden change is natural, however, we are not an ordinary company.”
In August of this year, OpenAI’s co-founder John Schulman announced on X that he had joined Anthropic, a competitor in the field of artificial intelligence startups.
Another co-founder, Greg Brockman, indicated on X that he would be on leave until the end of this year.
The third co-founder and Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever, left OpenAI in May of this year.
In November 2023, Altman was fired from OpenAI due to communication breakdown and trust issues. However, five days later, he was reinstated due to being hired by Microsoft. Up to that point, Microsoft had invested over $10 billion in OpenAI since 2018.
OpenAI, founded in 2015, is a non-profit organization. By 2018, the company had added the for-profit entity OpenAI LP as a subsidiary. Additionally, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, Elon Musk, had left the company.