In the middle of the year, the most important people at Open AI, Sam Altman’s company, suddenly began to leave. First, in May, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who led the super alignment team, left Open AI, followed by Jan Leike, the co-leader of the same team.
However, that was not the end, as another team member left Open AI. This was Gretchen Krueger, who stated that she shares the concerns of her aforementioned colleagues. She added that more needs to be done to improve ‘decision-making processes; accountability; transparency; documentation; policy implementation; the care with which we use our own technology; and mitigating the impact on inequality, rights, and the environment.’
A few months later, the departures continued. Now it was the turn of Mira Murati, the Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, one of the key people in this tech company. Her departure prompted significant leadership changes at a time when the company is considering changing its corporate structure, transitioning from a non-profit company to one that is more attractive to investors.
—
—
In a message to employees shared on Wednesday, Murati wrote that after much thought, she made the difficult decision to leave Open AI, and immediately after her, Bob McGrew, the Chief Research Officer, and Barret Zoph, the Vice President of Research, announced their departures.
This departure comes at a time when OpenAI, supported by Microsoft’s investments, is going through a series of high-profile departures this year, including founders John Schulman and Ilya Sutskever. Schulman joined the competing company Anthropic, while Sutskever launched his own project focused on building ‘safe’ AI models.
Two heroes
Of the eleven founders of OpenAI, only two remain after Greg Brockman announced his departure by the end of the year in August. Murati led the development of ChatGPT as a standalone product, based on the technical achievements of GPT, the language that powers this tool. She also oversaw the releases and improvements of the image generation tool DALL-E and the code generator Codex. Murati joined OpenAI in 2018, having previously worked at Magic Leap and Tesla.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, announced the promotions of Mark Chen to the position of Senior Vice President of Research and Josh Achiama to the position of Mission Compliance Lead, emphasizing the need to ‘ensure the success of the mission.’
– Leadership changes are a natural part of the development of any company, especially one that is growing so rapidly and setting high demands. I will not claim that this situation is normal, but OpenAI is not an ordinary company – said Altman.
Altman emphasized that Murati, McGrew, and Zoph made their decisions to leave independently and in a friendly manner. However, due to the timing of Murati’s decision to leave, they felt it was best to carry out the leadership transition all at once to ensure a smooth transition.
Last November, Murati temporarily took over the position of CEO after the board removed Altman, accusing him of a lack of transparency. Murati led the company for four days until Altman was reinstated at the helm of the company under pressure from investors and employees. A subsequent independent investigation cleared him of the charges and allowed him to rejoin the board. In her farewell message, Murati explained that she is stepping back to have ‘time and space for her own research.’ In October of last year, a month before the leadership turmoil, Murati and Sutskever expressed their concerns about Altman to the board. They believed that his leadership style fostered a toxic work environment and cited this as one of the reasons for his removal. However, shortly after Altman’s removal, both participated in negotiations for his return, and Murati remained with the company after his reinstatement as CEO.
As OpenAI continues to grow rapidly, discussions about the commercialization of products and pressure to create revenue-generating products have created new challenges within the company. Former employees point out that OpenAI has become more similar to an ordinary tech company over time, with an emphasis on product and market success, while moving away from its original altruistic mission. OpenAI is currently negotiating a change in its corporate structure to make it more attractive to investors while simultaneously developing new products and artificial intelligence models. The company is valued at $150 billion, and a new funding round of over $6 billion is expected.
