Who is Mira Murati, OpenAI’s interim CEO?

OpenAI’s new interim CEO is considered a “product person” who supports regulatory oversight of artificial intelligence.

OpenAI’s board of directors ousted founder Sam Altman on Nov. 17, shocking the technology world, while appointing Mira Murati as its interim CEO. 

Since then, the board has been facing strong criticism from the startup major clients and investors. According to a Bloomberg report, efforts to reinstate Altman as CEO have already involved Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest shareholder.

Meanwhile, Murati is the interim CEO. She has been on OpenAI since 2018. At the time, the company operated as a nonprofit research center but soon transformed into the business behind the global chatbot ChatGPT.

Prior to OpenAI, Murati reportedly spent a summer as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, followed by positions in engineering at Zodiac Aerospace and Tesla, as described in a Women’s Agenda bio based on her LinkedIn profile — unfortunately no longer available.

Murati was reportedly appointed as vice president of product and engineering at Ultraleap in 2016. At OpenAI, she joined as vice president of applied AI and partnerships, before rising to senior vice president of research, products and partnerships and, finally, to her role as chief technology officer in 2022.

The interim CEO was born in Albania and received a degree from Dartmouth College, an Ivy League institution, in 2012. According to The Wall Street Journal, Murati is a “product person”, who believes that AI shouldn’t be confined to research projects.

“It’s important that we bring in different voices, like philosophers, social scientists, artists, and people from the humanities,” she said in an interview with TIME Magazine earlier this year. Regulators should be included in this group of “different voices,” according to Murati:

“It’s important for OpenAI and companies like ours to bring this into the public consciousness in a way that’s controlled and responsible. But we’re a small group of people and we need a ton more input in this system and a lot more input that goes beyond the technologies-—definitely regulators and governments and everyone else.”

She is behind the development and management of some of OpenAI’s most groundbreaking projects, including the image-generator model DALL-3, the speech-recognition tool Whisper, and the latest version of the company’s chatbot GPT-4

Just made ChatGPT available on our API! Our incredible team of builders has delivered 10x cheaper model than our existing GPT-3.5 models, through system-wide optimizations, making it easier to power as many applications as possible.https://t.co/dUSp7rLs1I

— Mira Murati (@miramurati) March 1, 2023

A look at Murati’s profile on X (formerly Twitter) illustrates her engagement with product development at OpenAI. New features and product updates are the only topics she talks about on the social media platform.

Murati has not spoken publicly since the latest developments on OpenAI. She no longer has a LinkedIn account, and her last post on X is from Nov. 6, when ChatGPT Turbo was released. 

GPT-4 Turbo https://t.co/eUxOUeZVHs

— Mira Murati (@miramurati) November 6, 2023

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