The sudden resignation of OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati on Wednesday 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.
Now, nearly 10 months later, OpenAI is reportedly working on a $6.5 billion funding round at a stunning valuation of $150 billion. As Fortune reported a couple weeks ago, Altman told staffers that OpenAI’s next phase would come with a restructuring, turning it into a more traditional for-profit company.
Reuters reported Wednesday that OpenAI will become a B Corporation—essentially a socially minded for-profit company—with its nonprofit continuing to exist, but only as a minority shareholder. There would no longer be a cap on the profits that investors could expect to see.
Crucially, it seems Altman himself would for the first time hold equity in OpenAI. He has held back from taking this step until now, saying he’s rich enough already, but it could well be that investors want to ensure the company’s high-profile leader “has skin in the game” and will see his financial interests aligned with theirs—a more familiar situation in the world of Big Tech.
Investors probably would also prefer to see an OpenAI whose leadership slate is free of executives who have previously been associated with a coup against the boss. With Murati leaving, that’s finally going to be the case.
The executive who was most deeply enmeshed in the coup, cofounder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, bailed in May alongside key researcher Jan Leike, who had been one of the organization’s lead AI safety researchers. (Sutskever has since launched his own startup, Safe Superintelligence, while Leike went over to OpenAI rival Anthropic.) There has since been a massive exodus of other OpenAI safety specialists, as Fortune reported last month.
Even cofounder Greg Brockman, a fierce Altman ally who quit when the CEO was fired and returned alongside him, is out of the picture, for now at least—he recently went on sabbatical, just as cofounder John Schulman defected to Anthropic. Of the original 11 cofounders of OpenAI, only Altman and AI researcher Wojciech Zaremba are still working full-time at the company.
"When I think about OpenAI, I think about Greg, and I think about Ilya. And with no Ilya, it’s a different company. With no Greg, it’s a very different company,” said one former employee who left prior to Altman’s brief removal last year.
Also on Wednesday, chief research officer Bob McGrew and research VP Barret Zoph announced they were leaving, too. Altman said in a note to staff that McGrew, Zoph, and Murati “made these decisions independently of each other and amicably, but the timing of [Murati’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.”
OpenAI’s leadership is clearly undergoing a massive refresh, with many of its members now being post-coup hires with more traditional Big Tech backgrounds. The company has also grown enormously since Altman’s brief ouster. OpenAI is believed to employ at least 3,500 people now, according to analysis of LinkedIn affiliations, compared with about 750 in November 2023. Many of those people have come to the company from traditional tech companies, where they had roles in areas as diverse as sales and developer support, as opposed to the AI research and AI safety communities from which OpenAI primarily drew its initial staffers.
Those new hires have changed the culture of OpenAI. “I think OpenAI has just regressed to the mean of being ‘just another flashy tech co,’” one researcher who left the company in recent months said. The person added that they were worried about what this meant in the context of developing increasingly powerful AI software and that they had “concerns about the quality of [OpenAI’s] analytical thinking” when it came to assessing the risks of the technology it is building.
As for Murati, her exit from OpenAI creates tantalizing questions around the future of the most powerful woman in the AI industry, and one of the most prominent in the wider tech sector.
“I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” she said in her statement on X.
Given her high profile and considerable achievements to date, both on the technical and operational sides, perhaps this overwhelmingly male-dominated space will soon at last include a prominent company that’s led by a woman.
Update, Sept. 26: This story has been updated to include quotes from former OpenAI employees on the changing culture at the company.
