Who is Mira Murati, OpenAI’s new interim CEO?
In a surprising move, OpenAI today abruptly fired Sam Altman, its CEO and board member, and named CTO Mira Murati as interim CEO. But who exactly is Mira Murati?
Murati, a mechanical engineering graduate from Dartmouth College, previously worked as an intern at Goldman Sachs and then at Zodiac Aerospace, the French aerospace group. She spent three years at Tesla as senior product manager of the Model AI.
In 2016, Murati joined Jumping movement, a startup that makes hand and finger tracking motion sensors for PCs, as VP of Product and Engineering. Murati wanted to make the experience of interacting with a computer “as intuitive as playing with a ball,” she said. said Fast Company in an interview. But she quickly realized that the technology, which was based on a VR headset, was too early.
In 2018, Murati joined OpenAI as Vice President of Applied AI and Partnerships. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, she led the company’s work on the viral AI-powered chatbot. ChatGPTtext-to-image conversion AI SLAB and the code generation system Manuscriptwhich feeds GitHub co-pilot product.
So what kind of interim CEO will Murati be? Perhaps she will choose not to make waves while OpenAI’s 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 future of business and one of the most promising paths to high-performance AI. Additionally, Murati seems to strongly believe in the need to test this type of AI in the open in order to identify flaws and uncover potentially 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 the way we do,” Murati told Fast Company. “You bring technology into contact with reality; you see how people use it, what the limits are; you learn from it; and you can feed it back into technology development. The other dimension is that you can actually see how [the technology is] get things done in solving real-world problems or if it’s something new.
Murati’s projected strength, for what it’s worth. At a company-wide meeting on Friday, she would have told OpenAI employees that Satya Nadella and Kevin Scott, CEO and CTO respectively of Microsoft, one of the biggest donors – had “the utmost confidence” in OpenAI’s leadership. And she reiterated that OpenAI is starting to look for a new CEO.
