WASHINGTON (Daily Point) – OpenAI has announced the termination of CEO Sam Altman and the company’s president Greg Brockman, with Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Mira Murati stepping in as the interim CEO, as reported by Bloomberg.
In a memo, Murati expressed feeling “honored and humbled” to take on the leadership role at the company. Murati, who holds a degree in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth College, began her career as an intern at Goldman Sachs and later worked at Zodiac Aerospace, the French aerospace group, according to TechCrunch.
Prior to joining OpenAI, Murati spent three years at Tesla as the senior product manager for the Model X. She also served as the Vice President of Product and Engineering at Leap Motion, a startup specializing in hand- and finger-tracking motion sensors for PCs.
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 as the vice president of applied AI and partnerships and was promoted to CTO in 2022. Notable contributions include leading the development of OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E, and the code-generating system Codex, which powers GitHub’s Copilot product.
As OpenAI searches for a permanent CEO, Murati sees the future of the company in multimodal models like GPT-4 with Vision, capable of understanding both image and text context. She emphasizes the importance of openly testing this AI to identify bugs and discover new applications.
In a companywide meeting, Murati reassured OpenAI employees that Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella and CTO Kevin Scott, key backers of OpenAI, have “utmost confidence” in the company’s direction. Murati believes in the strength of multimodal models and their potential to lead OpenAI towards achieving ultra-capable AI. She emphasizes the importance of putting technology in contact with reality to understand its limitations and impact on real-world problems.
Murati’s leadership comes at a crucial time for OpenAI, and her vision aligns with a commitment to innovation and transparency in the development of advanced AI technologies.
