OpenAI in Turmoil, Again: CTO and Key Researchers Resign

TLDR

• CTO Mira Murati, who is often the public face of OpenAI along with CEO Sam Altman, has resigned amid talk that the company is transitioning into a for-profit entity.
• Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and another researcher resigned hours later.
• The high-level exodus began in May with the departure of Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. OpenAI President Greg Brockman is on sabbatical until the end of the year.

Key executives from OpenAI have resigned, continuing a high-level exodus that began in May amid talk that the AI startup will become a for-profit company.

The exits arguably call into question their confidence in OpenAI’s trajectory as it is steered by CEO Sam Altman. According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is transitioning into a for-profit company – a big pivot from its roots as a nonprofit entity designed to keep humanity safe from AI harms. Altman will own a stake in the new OpenAI; he had no stake in the nonprofit version.

The explosive popularity of ChatGPT changed the game for OpenAI, catapulting it overnight from a humble AI startup to what is perhaps the world’s most important generative AI company. The restructuring will make OpenAI more attractive to investors; OpenAI is in the midest of a funding round of up to $6.5 billion, according to the Journal.

Mira Murati, the CTO of OpenAI who is often the public face of the company along with Altman, announced on X (Twitter) that she has “made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI” after 6.5 years. “I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” she said, without further details.

Hours later, OpenAI Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew also announced his departure, on X. “It’s time for me to take a break,” he said.

Around the same time, OpenAI researcher Barret Zoph also announced on X that he was resigning. “Right now feels like a natural point for me to explore new opportunities outside of OpenAI.”

In May, OpenAI Chief Scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever quit, followed within a week by Jan Leike, co-leader of its safety team. Leike said that “over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products” at OpenAI.

“Stepping away from this job has been one of the hardest things I have ever done, because we urgently need to figure out how to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us,†Leike had said.

In August, co-founder John Schulman also left while President and co-founder Greg Brockman said he was taking a sabbatical until the end of the year. Leike and Schulman later joined OpenAI rival Anthropic while Sutskever started his own firm, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

The AI Innovator reached out to OpenAI for comment.