Three top technical executives at Microsoft-backed OpenAI announced their decisions to quit on Wednesday in what appears to be the latest in a string of high-profile departures this year at the startup behind the ChatGPT.
Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, VP Research Barret Zoph, and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew all announced their departures via X on Wednesday afternoon.
The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup is negotiating a new $6.5 billion financing round valuing the company at $150 billion, contingent on the company upending its corporate structure.
The company plans to restructure to a for-profit benefit corporation and will give CEO Sam Altman an equity stake, Reuters reported on Wednesday. Currently, a non-profit board controls the for-profit entity, an unusual structure that led to members of the non-profit board ousting Altman in November 2023 over a breakdown in communication and loss of trust. He was reinstated after five days.
The funding round has not closed yet and the company is in the process of finalizing it.
It was unclear whether the executives' departure could affect the ongoing fundraising. Some fundraising documents contain a "material adverse change" clause, which allows investors to withdraw from a deal if the company encounters anything that could have a significant negative impact.
Murati is still working at OpenAI whilenegotiatings her exit from the company, according to a source close to Murati. She has been part of the ChatGPT maker for 6 1/2 years and briefly served as CEO in November when the board temporarily busted Altman.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Murati joined OpenAI as the "VP of Applied AI and Partnerships" in December 2020 and was promoted to CTO in May 2022. Before OpenAI, she worked at the virtual and augmented reality startup Leap Motion and at Tesla.
As CTO, Murati frequently appeared alongside Altman as the public face of the ChatGPT maker. When OpenAI launched its GPT-4o model in May, capable of having realistic voice conversations, Murati led the presentation.
"I'm stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration," Murati wrote a post on X.
Murati, Zoph and McGrew are the latest in a string of OpenAI executive departures. In August, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman said on X that he had joined rival AI company Anthropic and another co-founder, Greg Brockman, also said on X he was taking a sabbatical through the end of the year. A third co-founder, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, left OpenAI in May.
On X, Altman said Murati did not inform him before her departure, explaining that she wanted to do it when the company was on an upswing and that "There is never a good time." In the same post, Altman also announced a slew of internal promotions: Matt Knight to chief information security officer, Josh Achiam to head of mission alignment and Mark Chen to senior vice president of Research.
