What's Next for OpenAI's Former CTO?

Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of OpenAI, announced her departure from the company last week. In a post on a popular social media platform, Murati expressed her gratitude for the opportunity to work with the OpenAI team and revealed that she was leaving to explore new opportunities. With her departure, venture capitalists are eagerly waiting to meet with her, anticipating that she will start her own company soon. Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 to work on supercomputing strategy. During her tenure, she oversaw the teams that developed the company's flagship products, ChatGPT and Dall-E. Her departure comes at a time when OpenAI is restructuring from a nonprofit subsidiary to a for-profit benefit corporation and planning to give its CEO, Sam Altman, equity for the first time.

Venture capitalists are clamoring to be among the first checks into a startup founded by former OpenAI employees. In the past few years, dozens of former OpenAI staff members have gone on to start companies. Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever raised $1 billion for AI research lab Safe Superintelligence, while Andrej Karpathy started Eureka Labs, focused on applying AI to education. Murati's departure is not an isolated incident. Two other technical executives, Bob McGrew, chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, vice president of research, also announced their departures last week. Only two of the original 11 co-founders remain at the company.

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