Turmoil at OpenAI as top executives leave

Turmoil at the top of OpenAI has intensified with a further exodus of key executives amid reports that the company behind ChatGPT could change its founding principles to become a “for-profit” business.
The Microsoft-backed OpenAI has struggled to balance its commercial pursuits with its structure as a non-profit research organisation, established when it was founded by entrepreneurs including Elon Musk in 2015.
Now it is looking to give Sam Altman, its chief executive, a stake in the business and is considering becoming a “public benefit corporation” in order to become more attractive to investors, the Financial Times reported.
The chief technology officer of OpenAI announced she was leaving on Wednesday. Mira Murati, 35, has been part of OpenAI for more than six years and recently launched o1, a new AI model that she claims displays human-like reasoning.
“I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” Murati told colleagues in a message shared in a post on X. “There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right.”
Bob McGrew, the company’s chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, its vice-president of research, also said they were leaving.
Murati was briefly parachuted in as chief executive in November when the board temporarily ousted then reinstated Altman 39, its co-founder, over the course of a fraught weekend.
Altman acknowledged it was not “natural” for her departure to be “so abrupt”, but added “we are not a normal company and I think the reasons Mira explained to me (there is never a good time, anything not abrupt would have leaked and she wanted to do this while OpenAI was in an upswing) make sense”.
He said the resignation decisions had been made “independently of each other and amicably, but the timing of Mira’s decision was such that it made sense to now do this all at once, so that we can work together for a smooth handover to the next generation of leadership”.
The announcements came after a reported $6.5 billion fundraising round, which values the company at $150 billion, according to Bloomberg News.
The exits follow those of other senior OpenAI executives, including Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman, two co-founders who left the company this year. Several safety executives, including Jan Leike, have quit the business amid concern about the commitment to safety in its models.
In a parting shot when he resigned in May, Leike said: “Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavour, but over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products.”
OpenAI has said it has boosted its safety work, internal governance and federal government collaboration to keep up with the models’ new capabilities. “As part of developing these new models, we have come up with a new safety training approach that harnesses their reasoning capabilities to make them adhere to safety and alignment guidelines,” it said in a statement this month.