TMTPost -- OpenAI, the leading artfiicial intelligence (AI) startup behind ChatGPT, loses another senior executive amid its top management shuffle this year.

Credit：Xinhua News Agency

OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, a veteran working for six and a half years, will leave the company, according to the tech chief’s post at X Wednesday. The post forwarded a resignation letter to OpenAI team that day, which expressed Murati’s gratitude to the CEO Sam Altman and the president Greg  Brockman for their trust and support throughout the years.

Murati said the decision to leave is a difficult one after much reflection and “there is never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right.” She noted OpenAI just released speec-of-speech and the AI model o1, marking the beginning of a new ear in interation and intelligence.

As to the reason for leave, Murati said she wants to create the time and space to do her own exploration, without specifying the field or sector she has interests in.

Hours after Murati’s post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in his post at X that two more technical leaders--Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph have decided to depart the startup.  McGrew held the title of Chief Research Officer and Zoph held the title VP Research, according to their LinkedIn profiles. “Mira, Bob, and Barret made these decisions independently of each other and amicably, but the timing of Mira’s decision was such that it made sense to now do this all at once, so that we can work together for a smooth handover to the next generation of leadership,” Altman said in the post.

In the meantime, Altman unveiled new shakeup of leadershipt. Mark Chen, VP of Research will be OpenAI’s SVP of Research and will lead the research organization in partnership with Jakub Pachocki as Chief Scientist. Josh Achiam, a research scientist, is going to take on a new role as Head of Mission Alignment, working across the company to ensure that it get all pieces (and culture) right to be in a place to succeed at the mission.

The Chief Product Officer Kevin Wei and the VP of engineering Srinivas Narayanan will continue to lead OpenAI’s Applied team, which is responsible for bringing the company’s tech to both enterprise and cosumer customers. Matt Knight will be OpenAI’s Chief Information Security Officer having already served in this capacity for a long time.

Chen,  Pachocki, Wei, Narayanan, Knight, and Achiam will directly report to Altman. The chief executive said he has spent most of his time over the past year on the non-technical parts of OpenAI’s organization, and now  he is looking forward to spending most of time on the technical and product parts of the company.

Altman tried to play down the latest departure of the tech leaders. “Leadership changes are a natural part of companies, especially companies that grow so quickly and are so demanding,” he said. “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.”

OpenAI has experienced the executive turnover these months. Just three of its orginal 11 co-founders are still at the company, including Altman, Brockman who is leaving for a sabbatical untile the end of the year and Wojciech Zaremba, the Lead of Language and Code Generation.