In a surprising move, OpenAI today abruptly fired Sam Altman, its CEO and a board member, and installed CTO Mira Murati as interim CEO. But who exactly is Mira Murati?
Murati, who has a degree in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth College, previously worked as an intern at Goldman Sachs and then at Zodiac Aerospace, the French aerospace group. He spent three years at Tesla as senior product manager of the Model X, the automaker’s crossover SUV, during which Tesla released the first versions of Autopilot, its AI-enabled driver assistance software.
In 2016, Murati joined Leap Motion, a startup that makes motion sensors for computers that track hands and fingers, as VP of product and engineering. Murati wanted to make the experience of interacting with a computer “as intuitive as playing with a ball,” he said Fast Company in an interview. But he soon realized that the technology, which was based on a VR headset, was too early.
In 2018, Murati joined OpenAI as vice president of applied artificial intelligence and partnerships. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, he led the company’s work on the viral-powered chatbot ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E, and the Codex code generation system, which powers GitHub’s Copilot product.
What kind of interim CEO will Murati be? Perhaps he will choose not to rock the boat as the OpenAI board searches for a permanent replacement. But from what Murati has said in interviews, it’s clear that she sees multimodal models—that is, models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 with Vision, which can understand the context of images as well as text—as the company’s future, and one of the most promising paths to highly capable artificial intelligence. Additionally, Murati seems to be a firm believer in testing this type of AI out in the open in order to spot flaws and potentially discover new use cases.
“One of the reasons we wanted to pursue DALL-E was to get to a more robust understanding of the world, so that these models understand the world like we do,” Murati told Fast Company. “You put technology in touch with reality. You see how people use it, what the limitations are. you learn from it. and you can feed it back to the development of the technology. The other dimension is that you can actually see how much [the technology is] moving the needle on solving real-world problems or whether it’s innovation.”
The power Murati projects, for what it’s worth. During a corporate meeting on Friday, she According to reports told OpenAI employees that Satya Nadella and Kevin Scott — CEO and CTO, respectively, of Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s biggest supporters — had “the utmost confidence” in OpenAI’s direction. And he reiterated that OpenAI is starting a search for a new CEO.
Read more of the ongoing coverage of Sam Altman’s firing from OpenAI:
