OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati announced her resignation Wednesday, saying in a statement on X that “this moment feels right” to step away after six-and-half-years with the company.
“I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” she wrote.
Just hours after Murati’s announcement, OpenAI’s chief research officer Bob McGrew and a vice president of research, Barret Zoph, both revealed they would also be leaving the company.
McGrew, who is leaving OpenAI after eight years, said in a statement posted to X that it was “time for me to take a break.”
“The last eight years of OpenAI has been a humbling and awe-inspiring journey,” he said. “The small non-profit I joined in January 2017 has become the most important research and deployment company in the world.”
Zoph also explained his “difficult decision” to leave the AI company in a post on X, describing the current moment as “a natural point for me to explore new opportunities outside of OpenAI.”
“This is a personal decision based on how I want to evolve the next phase of my career,” he wrote. “OpenAI is doing and will continue to do incredible work and I am very optimistic about the future trajectory of the company and will be rooting everybody on.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a post of his own Wednesday night that the three company leaders had made their decisions to leave “independently of each other and amicably.”
“[T]he 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,” he said. “I am extremely grateful to all of them for their contributions.”
The latest departures follow a string of resignations from OpenAI earlier this year. Co-founder Ilya Sutskever and machine learning researcher Jan Leike both left the company in May, while co-founder John Schulman resigned last month.
The turnover at the top of the company also comes as OpenAI is reportedly considering restructuring to become a for-profit business.
As part of the restructuring, the company would become a public benefit corporation, a for-profit entity aimed at bettering society and would no longer be controlled by its nonprofit board, Reuters first reported Wednesday.
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
