Mira Murati, chief technology officer at OpenAI, during an interview on “The Circuit with Emily Chang” in San Francisco on April 4, 2023.
Philip Pacheco | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI’s board of directors is considering plans to restructure the company into a for-profit company, according to a source who asked not to be identified because the talks are ongoing. The company will keep the nonprofit segment as a separate entity, the source said.
The structure will be clearer for investors and will make it easier for OpenAI employees to generate liquidity, the source added.
News of the discussions comes after Mira Murati, OpenAI's chief technology officer, said Wednesday that she would be leaving the company after six and a half years.
Later in the day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that chief research officer Bob McGraw and vice president of research Barrett Zoff would also leave, as the high-value AI company continues to lose top talent.
Moratti wrote in a note to the company that she was “stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own explorations.” She said her focus would be on ensuring a “smooth transition.”
“After much thought, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she wrote in the note, which she also posted on social media site X. “There is never a perfect time to walk away from a place you love, but this moment feels right.”
Altman wrote in a late afternoon post on X that McGraw and Zoff were leaving, and that their decisions were independent of each other.
“The timing of Mira’s decision was so good that it made sense to do all of this at once, so we could work together to ensure a smooth handover to the next generation of leadership,” Altman wrote.
They are the latest high-profile executives to leave OpenAI, which has gained popularity and value since launching its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and former safety chief Jan Lycke announced their departures in May. Co-founder John Schulman said last month he was leaving to join rival Anthropic.
OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, is currently seeking a funding round that would value the company at more than $150 billion, according to people familiar with the situation who asked not to be named because details of the round have not yet been disclosed. Thrive Capital is leading the round and plans to invest $1 billion, and Tiger Global is also planning to join.
Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple are also reportedly in talks to invest.
Interim CEO for a short period
While OpenAI has been in hypergrowth mode since late 2022, it has also been plagued by controversy and executive departures, with some current and former employees concerned that the company is growing too quickly to operate safely.
Moratti became a household name when OpenAI's board abruptly ousted Altman last November and Moratti was named interim CEO.
OpenAI’s board said in a statement at the time that Altman had not been “consistently forthright in his communications with the board.” The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reported that Sutskever focused on ensuring that AI would not harm humans, while others, including Altman, were more eager to move forward with new technology.
Nearly all OpenAI employees signed an open letter saying they were leaving the company in response to the board’s action. Days later, Altman returned to the company and Moratti returned to her former role as chief technology officer. Board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley left the board. Sutskever was removed from the board but remained an employee at the time.
Moratti raised eyebrows last June when he told an audience at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference that new AI tools would likely make some creative jobs disappear.
“Some creative jobs may disappear, but they probably shouldn’t have existed in the first place if the content they produce wasn’t of such high quality,” Moratti said in an on-stage interview. “I really believe that using them as a tool for education and creativity will expand our intelligence, our creativity and our imagination.”
McGraw wrote in a post on his personal Twitter page on Wednesday that since he joined the “small nonprofit” in January 2017, OpenAI has become “the most important research and publishing company in the world.” He said he would take a break, and that Mark Chen would lead the research team.
In a post on X, Zoff described it as “a natural step for me to explore new opportunities outside of OpenAI.” He added that “the post-training team has many talented leaders and is in good hands.”
