“I Have Made the Difficult Decision to Leave OpenAI,” says Mira Murati

OpenAI Mafia just got bigger. The company’s chief Mira Murati today announced her departure from OpenAI after over six years to explore new avenues. “I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” she added.

“I shared the following note with the OpenAI team today,” said Murati, in a post on X, “I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” showing her gratitude to Sam Altman and Greg Brockman for achieving amazing strides together in AI.

The note also touched upon some of the milestones achieved under her leadership, signifying major advancements in AI that have transformed user interactions and machine intelligence. “Our recent releases of speech-to-speech and OpenAI o1 mark the beginning of a new era in interaction and intelligence,” she added.

Further, she also highlighted the efforts in making AI more reliable and controllable. “Our work has made cutting-edge AI research more robust, aligned, and steerable than ever before,” said Murati.

What’s next? Given her passion for AI-driven societal transformation, ethical AI deployment, human-computer interaction, and solving global challenges—particularly in sustainability—Murati is most likely to pursue ventures that align with these areas in the future.

OpenAI Top Talent Quits

OpenAI is undergoing significant leadership changes with the recent departures of three key figures: co-founders John Schulman and Greg Brockman, and product manager Peter Deng.

OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman has taken an extended leave of absence, alongside John Schulman, who has left to join Anthropic, and Peter Deng, highlighting ongoing leadership changes within the company.

“I’m taking a sabbatical through the end of year. First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago,” said Brockman, highlighting that the mission is far from complete; they still have a safe AGI to build.

Meanwhile, Schulman announced his intentions of joining Anthropic, stating, “This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work.”

Further, he clarified, saying “To be clear, I’m not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI. My decision is a personal one, based on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career.”

It looks like Schulman left the company while remaining in their good books. Sam Altman thanked Schulman for his contributions to OpenAI, calling him “a brilliant researcher, a deep thinker about product and society, and mostly, you are a great friend to all of us,” reminiscing about their first meeting in 2015, where Schulman laid out much of OpenAI’s initial strategy in just 15 minutes.

However, the reason for Deng leaving the company remains unknown. It is most likely that he’s planning to start his own AI venture, given his passion and experience in building products like ChatGPT.

This development follows the departure of former OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, who left to start his own AI company, Eureka Labs. Eureka Labs is an AI+Education company focused on creating an AI-native learning environment. The goal of Eureka Labs is to revolutionise education by integrating generative AI with traditional teaching methods.

Previously, Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist at OpenAI, also announced his resignation and launched a new company called Safe SuperIntelligence, which raised $1 billion in funding from NFDG, a16z, Sequoia, DST Global, and SV Angel, led by Nat Friedman and SSI chief Daniel Gross–within a short span of three months.

Along with Sutsekver, Jan Leike, OpenAI’s head of alignment, also resigned and joined Anthropic. Leike announced he would continue working on the “super alignment mission”, focusing on scalable oversight, weak-to-strong generalisation, and automated alignment research.

The OpenAI mafia is just getting bigger and bigger with each passing day. Nearly 75 employees have left OpenAI and founded around 30 AI startups.

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