OpenAI is bleeding its top executives, and one picture shows just how stark the contrast has been in just over a year.
Of the four OpenAI executives in the March 2023 photo featured above, two have left the company and one is on leave. CEO Sam Altman is the only one actively working for the company.
The latest departure is Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, who said in a Wednesday note posted to X that she was stepping away after six-and-a-half years. One of Altman’s most trusted advisers, Murati was in charge of much of the company’s day-to-day operations, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Yet, she also played a role in ousting Altman as CEO last year before he returned to the top job days later. Murati reportedly wrote a private memo to Altman questioning his management and shared her concerns with the board of directors. The OpenAI board in part seized upon Murati’s criticism to force Altman out, the New York Times reported.
Murati’s departure comes as OpenAI plans to convert to a for-profit company after being founded as a nonprofit. The change takes it away from its original creed: “to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”
In response to a question about Murati’s departure, a spokesperson for OpenAI referred Fortune to a post on X by Altman.
Wild.
— Gavin Baker (@GavinSBaker) September 25, 2024
Everyone has left OpenAI, Sam is brilliant but not technical and Microsoft is furiously trying to make their own model to replace OpenAI. pic.twitter.com/naVBiVcVjG
Another instrumental player in Altman’s ouster was cofounder and board member Ilya Sutskever. The AI researcher raised alarms about Altman not paying attention to the risks that come with AI and said the CEO “was not consistently candid” with the board. After Altman was restored as CEO, Sutskever stayed on at the company as its chief scientist, but was removed from the board and mostly stayed out of the spotlight. After almost a decade, Sutskever left OpenAI in May to start his own AI company, Safe Superintelligence.
Rounding out the departed executives in the picture is president Greg Brockman, who publicly resigned from the company after Altman was ousted last November. Brockman said in a post on X last month that he was taking a sabbatical through the end of the year.
“First time to relax since cofounding OpenAI nine years ago,” Brockman wrote in the post.
OpenAI has also lost several employees who aren’t in the iconic picture from March 2023. On Wednesday, along with Murati, the company lost its chief research officer Bob McGrew and a vice president of research who worked on ChatGPT, Barret Zoph, the Journal reported. Last month, cofounder John Schulman also jumped ship to go work at AI competitor Anthropic.
In a post on X Wednesday, Altman wished Murati and the other two departing employees well, though he acknowledged that Wednesday’s exodus of senior talent was unusual.
“Leadership changes are a natural part of companies, especially companies that grow so quickly and are so demanding,” he wrote. “I obviously won’t pretend it’s natural for this one to be so abrupt, but we are not a normal company…”
