On September 25, 2024 local time, Mira Murati, the chief technology officer of OpenAI, said she will resign after six and a half years of work.
In a memo sent to employees and shared on X (formerly Twitter), she said that her resignation is to "make time and space for her own exploration."
Murati's resignation caused shock within OpenAI's staff. She has played an important role in the development of OpenAI. Especially after CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted last year, she also served as the interim CEO.
Shortly after Murati announced her resignation, Altman revealed that two other technical bigwigs - Bob McGrew, the chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, the vice president of research - also resigned.
Bob McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and has been working at the company for nearly eight years; Barret Zoph joined OpenAI before ChatGPT was launched in 2022.
According to foreign media reports, the successive resignations of executives may be related to Altman's attempt to transform OpenAI into a traditional for-profit company.
Sources said that under the new structure, OpenAI will operate as a for-profit company like its competitor Anthropic. The non-profit board will lose control but retain a minority stake in the new for-profit OpenAI entity.