Mira Murati, chief technology officer of OpenAI, during an interview on “The Circuit with Emily Chang” in San Francisco on April 4, 2023.
Philip Pacheco | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI’s board of directors is considering plans to restructure the company into a for-profit business, according to a source who spoke on condition of anonymity because talks are ongoing. The company will maintain its nonprofit division as a separate entity, the source said.
The structure would be simpler for investors and make it easier for OpenAI employees to realize liquidity, the source added.
News of the talks comes after OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer, Mira Murati, said Wednesday that she is leaving the company after six and a half years.
Later in the day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said chief research officer Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph, vice president of research, are also leaving as the highly valued AI startup continues to lose top talent.
Murati wrote in a note to the company that she is “leaving because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” He said he would focus on ensuring a “smooth transition”.
“After much consideration, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” he wrote in the memo, which also posted on the social networking site X. “There is never an ideal time to move away from a place one loves, yet this time is right.”
Altman wrote in the late afternoon posting on X that McGrew and Zoph were leaving and that their decisions were independent of each other.
“The timing of Mira’s decision was such that it made sense to do so immediately so that we can work together for a smooth handover to the next generation of leadership,” Altman wrote.
He is the latest high-level executive to leave OpenAI, which has exploded in popularity and value since launching its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and former security leader Jan Leike announced their departures in May. Co-founder John Schulman said last month he was leaving to join rival Anthropic.
OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, is currently seeking a funding round that would value the company at more than $150 billion, according to sources familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified because details of the round have not been made public. Thrive Capital is leading the round and plans to invest $1 billion, while Tiger Global plans to participate as well.
Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple are according to information also in investment talks.
Interim CEO for short
While OpenAI has been in hyper-development mode since late 2022, it has been at the same time fraught with controversy and executive departures, with some current and former employees concerned that the company is growing too fast to operate safely.
Murati became a household name when OpenAI’s board abruptly ousted Altman last November, and Murati was named interim CEO.
OpenAI’s board said in a statement at the time that Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications with the board.” The Wall Street Journal and other media reported that Sutskever trained his focus on making sure AI didn’t harm people, while others, including Altman, were more eager to push the delivery of new technology.
Almost all OpenAI employees had signed an open letter saying they would quit in response to the board’s action. Days later, Altman returned to the company and Murati returned to her previous role as CTO. Board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley were out. Sutzkever was removed from the board but remained an employee at the time.
Murati raised eyebrows in June, telling an audience at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference that new artificial intelligence tools will likely make some creative jobs disappear.
“Some creative work will maybe disappear, but maybe it shouldn’t have been there in the first place if the content that comes out of it isn’t very high quality,” Murati said in an on-stage interview, adding: “I really believe that the use of as a tool for education [and] creativity will expand our intelligence and creativity and imagination.”
McGrew wrote in a departure location on Wednesday that, since joining the “small non-profit organization” in January 2017, OpenAI has “become the most important research and development company in the world.” He said he is taking a break and that Mark Chen will lead the research team.
In one posting on XZoph called it “a natural point for me to explore new opportunities outside of OpenAI.” He added that “the post-training team has many talented leaders and is being left in good hands.”
