Mira Murati's Exit
Mira Murati’s exit sets the stage for OpenAI’s reinvention as a profit-first corporation
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Mira Murati
Fortune · (Philip Pacheco—Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Fortune · (Philip Pacheco—Bloomberg/Getty Images)
David Meyer, Sharon Goldman
Updated Thu, September 26, 2024 at 1:44 PM EDT 6 min read
The sudden resignation of OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati on Wednesday [2024ISep25] marks the end of an era for the AI front-runner, just as the contours of its next phase start to become clearer.
Murati’s departure, alongside two other senior staffers, comes as the company is preparing to announce a new structure that will see its for-profit arm no longer subservient to the board of its nonprofit foundation. The changes highlight the extent to which OpenAI has been radically transformed in the 10 months since company CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted and then rehired in November 2023.
Murati informed Altman of her decision on Wednesday morning, before telling the world a few hours later. “There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right,” she said on X. “She wanted to do this while OpenAI was in an upswing,” said Altman in his own post.
“Leadership changes are a natural part of companies, especially companies that grow so quickly and are so demanding,” said Altman. “I obviously won’t pretend it’s natural for this one to be so abrupt, but we are not a normal company.”
However, Murati’s imminent departure—she’s hanging around for a handover, though the new CTO hasn’t yet been named—may help OpenAI to present itself as a normal Big Tech company, at an opportune time.
OpenAI began life as a nonprofit foundation, supported by donations from the likes of Elon Musk and billionaire LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman. More recently it has operated as a nonprofit organization with the prime directive of safely developing “artificial general intelligence”—but also one that controlled a for-profit arm that employed all OpenAI staff and was backed by outside investors. These investors were entitled to a share of any profits OpenAI eventually makes (right now the company is believed to be losing billions of dollars annually), but their upside was limited by a profit cap set at the time they invested.
This setup has become increasingly fraught over time, owing to the gargantuan costs involved in training leading-edge AI models, and the financial returns that investors expect to see for supporting those efforts.
The tension came to a head late last year, when OpenAI’s safety-first board abruptly ousted Altman, having lost trust in the CEO’s candor after a number of incidents, including apparently keeping them out of the loop about ChatGPT’s release, and replaced him with Murati as interim CEO. The New York Times later reported that Murati had complained to the board about Altman’s management before this episode, though she denied this. Either way, she quickly switched back to Team Altman and was herself briefly replaced as interim CEO by Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear, before Altman made his triumphant return five days after his ouster.
Source:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mira-murati-exit-sets-stage-114716419.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
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