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- Mira Murati announced her departure from OpenAI last week.
- In an X post, Murati wrote, "I'm stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration."
- Multiple of OpenAI's cofounders, including Ilya Sutskever, have gone on to start companies.
Venture capitalists are clamoring to meet with Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, as Silicon Valley expects her to start her own company soon.
"We're trying to get in front of her," said one venture investor. "I cold-emailed her," another investor told Business Insider.
Murati did not respond to a request for comment.
In a X post, Murati announced her departure from OpenAI last week. Murati wrote, "My six-and-half years with the OpenAI team have been an extraordinary privilege…There's never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right."
Murati also added, "I'm stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration."
VCs have been competing to be among the first checks into a startup founded by former OpenAI employees. Dozens of former OpenAI staffers, including the startup's other cofounders, have gone on to start companies over the past few years. Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever raised $1 billion for AI research lab Safe Superintelligence, reported Reuters. Andrej Karpathy started Eureka Labs focused on applying AI to education.
Anthropic was started in 2021 by Dario Amodei and a group of researchers within OpenAI. Aravind Srinivas, a former research scientist at OpenAI, founded the San Francisco-based AI search engine Perplexity.
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 to work on supercomputing strategy. She had previously worked at Tesla, focused on the electric car maker's Model X vehicle. At OpenAI, Murati oversaw the teams that developed the company's two flagship products, ChatGPT and Dall-E.
In response to Murati's sudden departure, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X, "I obviously won't pretend it's natural for this one to be so abrupt, but we are not a normal company, and I think the reasons Mira explained to me (there is never a good time, anything not abrupt would have leaked, and she wanted to do this while OpenAI was in an upswing) make sense."
This comes amid OpenAI's latest fundraise of $6.5 billion. Thrive Capital is leading the latest round with a $1 billion investment at a valuation of $150 billion before the investment, with SoftBank, Coatue, and Microsoft also participating, reported The Information. OpenAI is also restructuring from a nonprofit subsidiary to a for-profit benefit corporation and planning to give Altman equity for the first time, reported Reuters.
Two other technical executives– Bob McGrew, chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, vice president of research– also announced their departures last week. Altman and Wojciech Zaremba are the only co-founders remaining from the 11-person founding team.
Zaremba wrote in a viral X post, "Their departures made me think about the hardships parents faced in the Middle Ages when 6 out of 8 children would die prematurely," he wrote. "Despite the profound loss, the parents had to accept it and find deep joy and satisfaction in the 2 who survived."