Turmoil at OpenAI as top executives leave

Turmoil at the top of ChatGPT maker OpenAI has intensified with a further exodus of key executives amid reports it could change its founding principles to become a “for-profit” business.
The Microsoft-backed company has struggled to balance its commercial pursuits with its structure as a non-profit research organisation, established when it was founded by entrepreneurs including Elon Musk in 2015.
Now it is looking to give Sam Altman, its chief executive, a stake in the business and is considering becoming a “public benefit corporation” in order to become more attractive to investors, the Financial Times reported.
The chief technology officer of OpenAI announced she was leaving on Wednesday. Mira Murati, 35, has been part of OpenAI for more than six years and recently launched o1, a new AI model which she claims displays human-like reasoning.
“I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” Murati told colleagues and shared in a post on X.
She added: “There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right.
Bob McGrew, chief research officer and Barret Zoph, vice-president of research also announced they were leaving.
Murati was briefly parachuted in as chief executive in November when the board temporarily ousted then reinstated co-founder Sam Altman over the course of a fraught weekend.
Altman acknowledged it was not “natural” for her departure to be “so abrupt”, but added “we are not a normal company, and I think the reasons Mira explained to me (there is never a good time, anything not abrupt would have leaked, and she wanted to do this while OpenAI was in an upswing) make sense”.
He claimed that the resignation decisions were made “independently of each other and amicably, but the 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”.
The announcements came after a reported $6.5 billion fundraising round, which values the company at $150 billion, according to Bloomberg News.
The exits follow those of other senior OpenAI executives, including founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman, who left the company earlier this year.
Several safety executives, including Jan Leike, have left the business amid concern about the company’s commitment to safety in its models.
In a parting shot when he resigned in May, Leike said: “Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavour … but over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products.”
OpenAI has said it has boosted its safety work, internal governance and federal government collaboration to keep up with the models’ new capabilities.
“As part of developing these new models, we have come up with a new safety training approach that harnesses their reasoning capabilities to make them adhere to safety and alignment guidelines”, it said in a statement earlier this month.