Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati founds her own AI startup
Mira Murati, who recently left OpenAI, is to raise money for a new AI start-up with former colleagues.
Mira Murati at OpenAI's spring presentation.
(Image: Screenshot OpenAIs Frühjahrspräsentation)
Alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Mira Murati was the best-known face of the company as CTO for a long time. She only recently left OpenAI. No reason was given. It was assumed that it was due to the planned restructuring of the company. It is now said that Murati wants to found her own AI start-up. To this end, she is said to have already recruited other former OpenAI employees – including Barret Zoph, who announced his resignation on the same day as Murati.
According to reports, Murati is already raising money from venture capitalists to finance her new start-up. Admittedly, it is said to be an AI start-up, specifically, according to Reuters, it is about proprietary AI models. The extent to which the systems will be closed and the intended use remains completely unclear. It is also unknown whether Murati himself will become CEO of the company or take on a different role. When Sam Altman was briefly fired in the fall of 2023, Murati took on the role of interim CEO of OpenAI.
Murati as one of the most recognizable AI faces
Murati studied mechanical engineering. Before joining OpenAI, she worked at Tesla as a product manager for the Model X, among other things. She then moved to Leap Motion, which produced sensor devices, but whose technology has since been absorbed into other companies as a division. Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 and became CTO in 2022. Little is known about her reasons for leaving OpenAI. However, she joins a whole series of employees who have left the company. Many have moved to Ilya Sutskever's competitors Anthropic and Safe Superintelligence, while others have gone into business for themselves. Of the former founders of OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman and Greg Brockman as well as Adam D'Angelo remain. However, Brockman is taking a sabbatical until at least the end of the year. D'Angelo has moved to a kind of Oversight Board, where he and other members will monitor the technologies.
Until now, Murati has also been something of the face of OpenAI alongside Sam Altman. For example, she led the spontaneously convened spring presentation of OpenAI, at which GPT-4o was presented. The omnimodel enables the Advanced Voice Mode, i.e. the improved voice assistant. OpenAI had scheduled the event at short notice; it was the day before Google's major developer conference I/O. Murati was also the one who gave a much-noticed interview about the Sora training material and the AI models, among other things. The interview attracted attention because, on the one hand, Murati claimed not to know much and, on the other, she confirmed that the video AI was trained with all freely available video content from the internet – from YouTube to Instagram.
(emw)
