New York: Mira Murati has been appointed interim CEO of OpenAI after the dramatic ouster of Sam Altman. Murati was named as the interim chief executive of ChatGPT-creator OpenAi in the same announcement that informed of Altman’s sudden exit. The board of OpenAI said CEO Sam Altman was pushed out after a review found he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI, the company said in a statement on Friday.
Mira Murati is the 34-year-old former CTO of OpenAI who has now been elevated to the position of interim CEO. She has been described as the brilliant mind behind the development of OpenAI’s revolutionary products like ChatGPT and DALL-E.
Murati was born and raised in Albania to Albanian parents. When she was 16, she moved to Canada to attend Pearson College UWC.
She went on to study mechanical engineering at the Ivy League Dartmouth College in the US. During her days as an undergraduate, she built a hybrid race car for her senior project, according to the New York Times.
She started her career as an intern at Goldman Sachs and then at Zodiac Aerospace. After that, she spent three years at Tesla working on Model X.
According to Tech Crunch, Murati joined sensor-building startup Leap Motion in 2016 as VP of product and engineering. She left Leap Motion after two years to join OpenAI as VP of applied AI and partnerships.
“Both in my time at Tesla, and at a VR company [Leap Motion] I was doing applications of AI in the real world. I very quickly believed that AGI would be the last and most important major technology that we built, and I wanted to be at the heart of it,” Murati told Wired in a July 2023 interview.
Murati began working on supercomputing at OpenAI when she joined the organisation in 2018. In 2022, she was promoted to chief technology officer.
