- Three more top executives including CTO Mira Maruti, Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, and Vice President of Research Barret Zoph have announced that they are leaving OpenAI.
- The team is already being restructured and replacements are being made but a new CTO is yet to be announced.
- These departures come at a time when OpenAI is moving towards becoming a for-profit company.
Three more top executives at OpenAI have announced their departure from the company. Most surprisingly, it includes Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati. The other two are OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and Vice President of Research Barret Zoph. The news came on Wednesday afternoon through a post on X.
“My six-and-a-half years with the OpenAI team have been an extraordinary privilege. There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right.” – Mira Murati
She had played a pivotal role in the development of ChatGPT and Dall-E. She was also appointed the interim CEO when Altman was briefly ousted from the company in November 2022.
Over the last few months, OpenAI has witnessed many key departures.
- For instance, this May OpenAI chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever left the firm to start a new AI venture that is safer and sustainable.
- Just 3 months later in August, another OpenAI co-founder, John Schulman, left the company to join Anthropic – a rival AI firm.
- OpenAI president and co-founder, Greg Brockman, is also on extended leave.
Both McGrew and Zoph also announced their departure through X. McGrew shared a text screenshot with a message dedicated to AI while Zoph said it’s a natural point for him to explore something new and the team is being left in good hands.
What Does Sam Altman Have to Say About This?
In a post on X, Sam Altman addressed these departures and said that all three of them had made this decision independently.
He also dropped in a word of appreciation for the departing executives, saying that being an executive at Open-AI is all-consuming and they have all gone above and beyond all these years.
After Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph made their announcements, Altman updated his post and acknowledged their departures as well. In the same post, he announced the replacements.
- McGrew will be replaced by Mark Chen, who was involved in publicly demonstrating GPT-4o during its launch.
- Josh Achiam has been named the new head of mission alignment. A new CTO is yet to be announced.
OpenAI’s Restructuring Plans
The string of departures is no coincidence. It’s a result of OpenAI’s plans to restructure the company.
It initially started out as a non-profit research lab in 2015. But a few years later, a for-profit unit was established. And now, there are talks about restructuring the company in a way that will help generate more funds from investors. A new fundraising round is already being talked about, which can take the value of the company to $150 billion.
And some of the team members are not happy with this change. The original vision for the company that encouraged them to be a part of this journey is no longer the same and they don’t want to be a part of this new vision.
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