For years, Mira Murati worked behind the scenes at OpenAI, overseeing the development and delivery of groundbreaking products such as ChatGPT and DALL-E. Today, she steps into the spotlight as interim CEO.
Ms. Murati, 34, was elevated to the top job at the high-profile company on Friday when OpenAI’s board ousted Sam Altman, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. The company said Ms. Murati had “a unique skill set” and would ensure “a smooth transition while she conducts a formal search for a permanent CEO.”
Although she has held the title of chief technology officer since last year, current and former employees said Ms. Murati served as the company’s chief operations officer. She ensured that her engineers developed versions of ChatGPT on time. She also managed the company’s relationship with Microsoft, an investor and partner that deployed OpenAI technology, and she helped shape its artificial intelligence policy in Washington and Europe.
“She has a demonstrated ability to build teams with technical expertise, business acumen, and a deep appreciation of the importance of the mission,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, wrote in an article about him for time review. “As a result, Mira has helped create some of the most exciting AI technologies we have ever seen.”
Born in Albania and educated in Canada, Ms. Murati is a mechanical engineer by training who built a hybrid racing car while she was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College. She joined OpenAI in 2018 after stints at Tesla, where she played a key role in the development of the Model fingers.
Ms. Murati said her work at Tesla exposed her to AI and inspired her to seek employment in this field. OpenAI hired her as vice president of applied AI and partnerships. At the time, the company was a nonprofit organization whose mission was to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefited all of humanity. It then restructured itself as a for-profit company so it could raise the huge sums of money needed to develop its AI technologies.
“I thought that basically, if you construct intelligence, it’s such a central unit in the universe that it affects everything,” Ms. Murati said in August. at an event organized by Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. “What else is more inspiring than raising and increasing the collective intelligence of humanity?
OpenAI was overseen by a group of senior leaders including Mr. Altman; Greg Brockman, its former president; and Wojciech Zaremba, a Polish-born AI researcher who is also among the company’s founders. Ms. Murati, who was a member of the management team, would execute the team’s decisions throughout the company.
She took responsibility for the distribution of the DALL-E image generator and the ChatGPT text generator, which attracted hundreds of millions of users after its introduction last year. As ChatGPT and DALL-E took off, she made appearances on “The daily show,» Bloomberg Television and at several conferences.
“It is very important to involve the public, to make these technologies known to the public, but in a responsible and safe way,” Ms. Murati said “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah Last year.
