Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, is in the news after it was reported that, despite promising an employee $1 billion, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta company was unable to recruit staff from her organisation. According to a Wired story, Murati’s employees at Thinking Machines Lab have rejected enormous offers from Meta.
Meta’s $1B Offer to Murati’s Team Falls Flat
The US IT titan was trying to fill positions at Meta Superintelligence Labs, its new AI business. According to the article, Meta reached out to more than a dozen workers at Murati’s firm, which was only one year old. While others were given $200 to $500 million in compensation over time, one employee received a $1 billion offer. But no one took advantage of Meta’s alluring offer.
Zuckerberg’s Direct Outreach Signals Urgency
The story claims that Zuckerberg personally contacted a few of the Thinking Machines Lab staff members. Even though Thinking Machines Lab is a new firm and hasn’t released any products yet, this development showed how much Murati’s team believes in her.
At the moment, it is worth $12 billion. The former CTO of OpenAI has been in the tech sector for more than ten years. The 36-year-old engineer from Albania is well-known for heading up product development teams for programs like ChatGPT and DALL-E.
She is renowned for spearheading the design, development, and introduction of automotive goods like the Model X at Tesla Motors. She was formerly also connected to Ultraleap (formerly known as Leap Motion).
Mira Murati: From OpenAI CTO to AI Visionary
In November 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was overthrown in a spectacular coup, and Murati was appointed as the company’s acting CEO. She was one of the executives that expressed disapproval of Altman’s management style.
Remarkably, Altman was given back his position as CEO a few days later. She quit OpenAI in September 2024 to start her own business in the digital industry. In 2024, Time named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI. For “being a leading figure shaping the business world’s increasingly AI-centric future,” she was also named one of the Fortune 100 Most Powerful Women in Commerce for 2023.
Meta’s AI Ambitions: Shengjia Zhao Joins the Race
Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, will be the chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs, according to a statement released by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on 25 July. The $14 billion investment in Scale AI is the centrepiece of Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar hiring spree in artificial intelligence in recent weeks.
Zuckerberg revealed a brand-new company in June dubbed Meta Superintelligence Labs, which is composed of leading AI developers and researchers. Although the June message included Zhao’s name among other new staffers, Zuckerberg said that Zhao co-founded the lab and “has been our lead scientist from day one.”
Mira Murati has started her own artificial intelligence (AI) company, “Thinking Machines Lab,” over five months after leaving her position as CTO of OpenAI. The company’s objective, according to Murati, who announced the launch on X, is straightforward: develop AI by making it widely applicable and intelligible through sound foundations, open science, and real-world applications. The goal of the AI research and product startup is to close the current gaps in AI and increase the systems’ general capability, understandability, and customisability.
Although AI skills have significantly improved, there are still significant gaps, according to the company’s blog post. The fast-developing capabilities of frontier AI systems are not well understood by the scientific community. The best research labs hold the majority of the knowledge on how these systems are educated, which restricts both the public conversation about AI and people’s capacity to use it efficiently. Furthermore, despite their potential, people still find it challenging to adapt these systems to their own needs and values.
What Thinking Machine Lab will Offer?
Rather than concentrating on creating completely autonomous AI systems, Thinking Machines Lab will create customised AI systems with sophisticated multimodal capabilities. According to the AI firm, it intends to regularly release technical papers, blog entries, and code that emphasise cross-industry human-AI collaboration. Many of the roughly 30 workers at Thinking Machines Lab have prior experience with firms like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Character AI, and Mistral AI. After working with OpenAI for six years, Murati departed the company in September of last year. She stated that she was taking a break to “do her own exploration” at the time of her departure. She is Thinking Machines Lab’s CEO.
Barret Zoph, the CTO of Thinking Machines Lab, left OpenAI in September of last year. The company’s principal scientist is John Schulman, who departed OpenAI for rival company Anthropic in August of last year. According to reports, Murati is negotiating to raise $100 million for her new AI business from unidentified VC firms. The corporation did neither confirm nor deny if it had raised money in its blog post.
Growing Network of AI Startup
The most recent addition to the already saturated AI startup market is Thinking Machines Lab. In the global competition to develop generative AI models, it will face off against industry titans including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and Microsoft. India’s increasing need for AI hardware and software has opened the door for a new wave of entrepreneurs that prioritise using GenAI technology in consumer and corporate applications over infrastructure development. India is home to more than 200 GenAI businesses, which have earned a total of $1.2 billion in funding since 2020, according to the report “The Rise of India’s GenAI Brigade.”
As the former interim CEO and Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, Mira Murati is recognized not only for her credentials but also for her strong stance on the ethics of emerging technologies.
Mira Murati, a 34-year-old Albanian woman, is a prominent figure in the field of artificial intelligence as AI continues to dominate the global landscape. Leading the development teams behind groundbreaking projects like ChatGPT and DALL-E, she has been passionate about ensuring the public understands the potential of AI, particularly in the healthcare sector.
On September 25, 2024, after six and a half years with OpenAI, Murati announced her decision to step down as Chief Technology Officer. In a statement shared on X, Murati explained that “this moment feels right” for her to leave, highlighting OpenAI’s recent progress in the AI industry.
She mentioned her desire to “create time and space for personal exploration” as the reason for her departure but emphasized her focus on ensuring a smooth transition and keeping up the momentum the team has built. Murati expressed gratitude for the chance to work with such a remarkable team at OpenAI.
Along with Mira, VP Research Barret Zoph and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew also announced their departures via X from OpenAI.
Murati was born in Vlor, Albania, a nation in Southern Europe, on 16 December 1988. She went to Canada when she was 16 years old to attend Pearson College UWC, where she earned an International Baccalaureate diploma in 2007. She then attended Dartmouth College and earned a Bachelor of Engineering in mechanical engineering, where she also built a hybrid race car, graduating in 2012.
Mira Murati – Career
Murati began her career as an intern at Goldman Sachs in 2011, then moved on to Zodiac Aerospace from 2012 to 2013. She began her career at Tesla in 2013 as a senior product manager on the Model X, a luxury electric SUV. She began to genuinely engage with technology at Tesla, where she worked on early versions of Autopilot. In 2016, she left Tesla to join Leap Motion, a firm that creates motion-sensing technologies for virtual and augmented reality. There, she improved her skills in bridging the technical and human-computer interface divide. Drawn by the company’s mission to ensure that AGI benefits humanity, Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 as the Vice President of Applied AI and Partnerships. She was in charge of commercializing OpenAI’s products and enhancing them through human input. She also served on the leadership teams that created ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Codex, three of the world’s most sophisticated and dynamic AI systems.
She recently joined the board of directors of Unlearn.AI, a startup specializing in the development of machine learning methods capable of diagnosing diseases and accelerating their treatment.
Mira Murati – OpenAI
Founded in 2015 as a non-profit to develop AI that is “safe and broadly beneficial,” OpenAI has evolved to become one of the world’s most powerful AI organizations. Murati was promoted to the position of CTO of OpenAI in May 2022, where she oversaw the company’s research, product, and safety departments. After the board of directors dismissed Sam Altman in November 2023, she was appointed as the interim CEO of OpenAI. Murati was then replaced by Emmett Shear as the interim CEO of OpenAI.
Murati has constantly pushed for transparency and communication in the development of artificial intelligence, emphasizing the significance of open discourse and stakeholder participation. Murati is the company’s first female CEO and the first person of Albanian descent. As CEO, she was responsible for guiding OpenAI through a key transition time, combining her technological experience and business acumen to influence the company’s future course.
Murati stated her goal for OpenAI in her first interaction as interim CEO: to create a future where AI is a force for good, empowering individuals and solving global concerns. She emphasized the importance of developing AI with safety, justice, and inclusion as guiding principles, ensuring that it benefits mankind as a whole. She believes that artificial intelligence has the potential to solve some of the world’s most serious issues, such as climate change and healthcare. She is dedicated to harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence responsibly, ensuring that it becomes a tool for advancement rather than a danger to mankind.
On September 25, 2024, Murati resigned as the CTO of OpenAI. She wrote on X:
Murati’s favorite song is Radiohead’s Paranoid Android. She felt the song to be layered, with references to society and technology. Her favorite book is Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, a collection of poetry. She received it as a present. She was moved by the depth and beauty of the poems. 2001: A Space Odyssey is her favorite film.
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has successfully concluded negotiations for the return of Sam Altman as CEO, marking a resolution after approximately 100 hours since his initial departure. This decision follows intense deliberations concerning the future trajectory of the company, a central player in the artificial intelligence boom. Here is the sequence of events at OpenAI that culminated in the decision to reinstate Sam Altman as CEO:
In addition to Sam Altman‘s reinstatement, the company has committed to restructuring its board of directors, which was responsible for his dismissal. Notably, Bret Taylor, former co-CEO of Salesforce, has assumed the role of Chair, while Larry Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, has joined the board.
Bret Taylor (Chairman), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo – Board members of OpenAI
Confirming this significant development, OpenAI issued a statement on X, declaring, “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to resume his role as CEO at OpenAI, leading a new initial board featuring Bret Taylor as Chair, along with Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo.” The company is presently in the process of finalizing the finer details of this agreement.
Expressing his enthusiasm for the return, Sam Altman conveyed his commitment to OpenAI’s mission. In a post on X, Altman articulated, “I hold a deep affection for OpenAI, and every action I’ve taken in recent days has been geared towards preserving the unity of this team and its mission. I eagerly anticipate rejoining OpenAI and further strengthening our robust partnership with Microsoft.” Sam Altman expressed his eagerness to return to OpenAI, emphasizing his dedication to the organization’s mission. In a post on X, Altman stated,
i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together. when i decided to join msft on sun evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team. with the new board and w satya’s support, i’m…
Following Altman’s announcement, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who recently welcomed Altman into the company, endorsed the decision, citing it as a “first essential step” toward establishing a “more stable, well-informed, and effective governance” for OpenAI.
Altman’s reinstatement comes after he was dismissed by OpenAI’s board due to disagreements regarding the pace of artificial intelligence development and monetization. Negotiations for his return had faced challenges, including pressure for existing board members to resign. The board responded by appointing Emmett Shear, former CEO of Twitch, as the interim CEO and announced Microsoft’s plan to hire Altman for a new in-house AI team.
Following Sam Altman’s removal from his role on November 17, the board initially appointed Mira Murati, Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, as the interim CEO. However, this interim role was later assumed by Emmett Shear, former CEO of Twitch, on November 19.
By November 20, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and their associates would be joining the ranks of the technology giant.
In response to Altman’s potential absence, over 65% of OpenAI’s workforce, comprising more than 500 employees, threatened to resign and join Altman at Microsoft. This triggered intensive discussions, leading to the eventual return of both Altman and Greg Brockman, President of OpenAI.
At an Accelerated Pace Compared to Steve Jobs
Altman’s rapid turnaround has been likened to Silicon Valley legend Steve Jobs, who left Apple in a power struggle in 1985 and returned 12 years later. Altman resumed the CEO position after just four days.
The upheaval at OpenAI, initiated by Altman’s departure, saw President Greg Brockman resign in protest. The board’s unexpected appointment of Emmett Shear as interim CEO added further twists to the unfolding events.
Emmett Shear, in a post on X, detailed the efforts undertaken to restore stability to OpenAI, ultimately leading to Altman’s return. He emphasized that the chosen pathway maximized safety and considered the interests of all stakeholders.
Altman’s successful return was facilitated in part by Microsoft, which offered him the opportunity to lead a new research team alongside Brockman and other departing colleagues. The majority of OpenAI’s staff, numbering over 700, threatened to join Microsoft unless the board resigned and Altman was reinstated, leveraging Microsoft’s computing power and resources crucial to OpenAI’s technology.
In celebrating the resolution, co-founder and President Brockman expressed optimism, stating, “We will come back stronger & more unified than ever.”
After Mr. Altman’s removal, the OpenAI board appointed Mira Murati as the interim CEO. Ms. Murati, aged 34, had served as the company’s Chief Technology Officer since May of the previous year. Emphasizing an ongoing “search process to identify a permanent successor,” the company addressed the leadership transition.
This entire episode unfolded following Sam Altman’s dismissal by the OpenAI board on Friday. Mr. Altman had gained prominence with the launch of ChatGPT the previous year, sparking significant advancements in AI research and development, accompanied by substantial investments in the sector. Reports suggested that his termination resulted from efforts to increasingly monetize the company’s leading GPT-4 model, all while maintaining the secrecy of its internal workings, a development deemed problematic by the board.
November 18
On the day following his dismissal, Mr. Altman reportedly informed investors about plans to launch a new venture in collaboration with Mr. Brockman. Earlier in September, Mr. Altman and Jony Ive, Apple’s former design chief, were said to be in discussions about a project in its developmental stages—an innovative AI hardware device.
November 19
On Sunday, the board extended the role of interim chief to Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch. Mr. Shear, who had previously expressed concerns about AI being “dangerous” and susceptible to misuse, accepted the position. Upon learning of Mr. Altman’s return, Mr. Shear expressed his satisfaction with the outcome. Rumors of Mr. Altman’s sensational return began circulating on this day, with sources indicating investor pressure on the board to reverse its decision. Microsoft, as OpenAI’s largest shareholder, was reportedly approached for intervention on Mr. Altman’s behalf due to the significant investments made by Microsoft in OpenAI.
November 20
On Monday night, nearly all of OpenAI’s staff—over 700 out of around 770—threatened to resign and follow Mr. Altman to Microsoft. Citing concerns about working with individuals lacking “competence, judgment, and care for our mission,” they demanded the resignation of the board. Despite lucrative offers from Salesforce, most staff members displayed loyalty to OpenAI, refusing the offers. Additionally, Reuters reported that OpenAI had approached Dario Amodei, CEO of rival Anthropic, about potentially replacing Mr. Altman and exploring a merger between the two AI startups, an offer that was declined.
November 21
An internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg News revealed that OpenAI was engaged in “intense discussions” to reconcile its divided staff. The memo, dated the previous night and authored by Anna Makanju, Vice President of Global Affairs, mentioned ongoing communication with Mr. Altman regarding a possible return. Surprisingly, Mr. Nadella announced that Sam Altman and others would join Microsoft following their dismissal from OpenAI. He emphasized Microsoft’s approach to providing founders and innovators the space to build independent identities and cultures within the company.
November 22
Sam Altman has reclaimed the position of CEO at OpenAI a mere four days after being dismissed by the board, which had cited a “loss of confidence” in his leadership of the Microsoft-backed firm.
We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo.
We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.
The 38-year-old Sam Altman had gained prominence with the launch of ChatGPT, sparking a significant race in AI research and development, accompanied by substantial investments in the sector.
Early Life and Affection for Mac
Born in Chicago in 1985, Altman spent his formative years in St. Louis, Missouri, attending the prestigious John Burroughs School. Excelling academically, he grew up in what he describes as a “middle-class Jewish family.” Altman’s introduction to programming occurred at the age of 8 when his parents, dermatologist Connie Gibstine and real estate broker Jerry Altman, gifted him a Macintosh LC II. This pivotal moment ignited Altman’s passion for programming, marking a defining point in his life.
Coming Out and Personal Life
Altman openly addressed his sexuality during high school, a challenging experience given the Midwest’s climate during the 2000s. At 17, he spoke about being gay during an assembly for National Coming Out Day after a Christian group boycotted a sexuality-related event. Altman’s courage challenged the school to embrace diversity. He currently resides with his partner, Australian programmer Oliver Mulherin, in San Francisco, and both aspire to start a family. Before Mulherin, Altman co-founded Loopt with Nick Sivo, a mobile social network that eventually sold for $43 million in 2012.
Stanford and Entrepreneurial Beginnings
Altman enrolled at Stanford University for computer science but, alongside two classmates, dropped out to focus on Loopt. The startup, part of Y Combinator‘s inaugural batch, achieved a valuation of $175 million but was later sold for $43 million in 2012. Post-Loopt, Altman co-founded the venture fund Hydrazine Capital with his brother, Jack Altman, raising $21 million. He joined Y Combinator as a part-time partner in 2011, becoming its president in 2014, succeeding co-founder Paul Graham. Altman’s tenure saw Y Combinator thrive, establishing itself as a force in the tech industry. His prominence grew, and he was featured on Forbes 30 Under 30 for venture capital at age 29.
OpenAI and Technological Breakthroughs
In 2015, Altman co-founded OpenAI with tech luminaries like Elon Musk. Under his leadership, OpenAI received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019, integrating its technology into various Microsoft products. OpenAI’s revolutionary moment came with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, a viral sensation that marked the beginning of “generative” AI in technology. Altman guided OpenAI to the forefront of the tech industry as a leading company in artificial intelligence.
OpenAI has revealed an “agreement in principle” to reinstate Sam Altman as the CEO, with the departure of board members instrumental in his initial removal.
Why did the board fire Altman?
Sam Altman was fired as CEO of OpenAI due to a lack of transparency and candor in his communications with the board, leading to a loss of confidence in his ability to lead the company.
Is Microsoft the owner of OpenAI?
No, Microsoft is not the owner of OpenAI. However, it is a significant investor, having invested $13 billion in the company.
