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according to foreign media reports on september 26, openai chief technology officer mira murati said on wednesday that she will leave the company after six and a half years.

she wrote in a memo to openai: after careful consideration, i have made the difficult decision to leave openai.

the memo was also posted on social media site x. she added: “there’s never an ideal time to leave a place you hold dear, but this feels right.”

murati is the latest executive to leave the startup.

openai co-founder ilya sutskever and former safety head jan leike announced their departures in may.

co-founder john schulman said last month he was leaving to join competitor anthropic.

murati also wrote that she is "leaving because i want the time and space to pursue my own explorations. my primary focus right now is doing everything i can to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the momentum we have built."

shortly after murati announced his departure, reuters reported that openai planned to reorganize as a for-profit company that would no longer report to a nonprofit board. the company will retain its nonprofit arm, according to reuters.

openai, the microsoft-backed company behind chatgpt and searchgpt, is seeking a funding round that would value it at more than $150 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

the source requested anonymity because details of the round have not yet been released. thrive capital is leading the round with a planned investment of $1 billion, and tiger global is also expected to join.

microsoft, nvidia and apple are also reportedly in talks to invest.

while openai has been in high-growth mode since launching chatgpt in late 2022, it has also been rife with controversy and high-level departures, with some current and former employees concerned that the company is growing too fast to operate safely.

in june, murati drew attention when he told an audience at the wall street journal’s wsj tech live conference that new ai tools could cause some creative jobs to disappear.

"some creative jobs may disappear, but if the content produced is not of high quality, they may not exist at all," murati said in an on-stage interview. "i firmly believe that using it as a tool for education and creativity will expand our intelligence, creativity and imagination."

murati's name became known last november when openai's board abruptly ousted ceo sam altman and appointed him interim ceo.

openai’s board said in a statement at the time that altman had not always been candid in his communications with the board.

the wall street journal and other media have reported that sutskever is focused on ensuring that ai doesn’t harm humans, while others, including altman, are more interested in pushing the new technology into the wild.

almost all of openai's employees signed an open letter stating that they would resign in response to the board's actions. a few days later, altman returned to the company and murati returned to her previous cto position. board members helen toner and tasha mccauley left. sutskever was removed from the board but remained an employee at the time.

murati's full memo is pasted below:

hello everyone,

i have something i want to share with you. after careful consideration, i have made the difficult decision to leave openal.

it has been an extraordinary privilege to work on the openal team for six and a half years. while there are many people i will express my gratitude to in the days ahead, i would first like to thank sam and greg for their trust in me to lead the technical organization and for their support over the years.

there’s never an ideal time to leave a place you love, but this moment feels right. our recent releases of speech-to-speech and openal o1 mark the beginning of a new era of interaction and intelligence — made possible by your ingenuity and craftsmanship. we’re not only building smarter models, we’re fundamentally changing the way ai systems learn and reason about complex problems.

we bring safety research from the realm of theory to real-world applications, creating models that are more powerful, more consistent, and more controllable than ever before. our work makes cutting-edge ai research intuitive and accessible, developing technology that adapts and evolves with everyone’s input. this success is a testament to our great teamwork, and it is because of your talent, your dedication, and your commitment that openal stands at the pinnacle of ai innovation.

i am leaving because i want to make time and space for my own exploration. my main focus right now is doing everything i can to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the momentum we have built.

i will be forever grateful for the opportunity to build and work with this outstanding team. together we are pushing the boundaries of scientific understanding to improve human well-being.

even though i may no longer be fighting alongside you, i will still be rooting for all of you.

i am deeply grateful for the friendships formed, the successes achieved, and most importantly the challenges overcome together.

mira