Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and a board of directors member, was unceremoniously removed today in an unexpected move, and CTO Mira Murati was named interim CEO. However, precisely who is Mira Murati?
Murati, who graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in mechanical engineering, was formerly an intern at Goldman Sachs and subsequently at the French aerospace company Zodiac Aerospace. She worked for Tesla for three years as a senior product manager for the company’s crossover SUV, the Model X. Early iterations of the AI-powered driver-assistance software Autopilot were deployed.
As VP of product and engineering, Murati joined Leap Motion in 2016, a startup developing motion sensors for PCs that tracked motion with the hands and fingers. In an interview with Fast Company, Murati stated that she aimed to make using a computer “as intuitive as playing with a ball.” However, she quickly concluded that the VR headset-based technology was too nascent.
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 as the vice president of partnerships and applied AI. She oversaw the development of the company’s text-to-image AI DALL-E, the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, and the code-generating system Codex, which powers GitHub’s Copilot product, after being elevated to CTO in 2022.
What kind of CEO will Murati be in the meantime, then? Maybe she won’t want to cause a stir while the board of directors of OpenAI looks for a long-term replacement. However, based on her interview statements, Murati believes that multimodal models—that is, models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 with Vision, which can comprehend both text and visual context—are the company’s best bet for becoming ultra-capable AI. Furthermore, Murati seems to believe in openly testing this AI to identify bugs and maybe uncover new applications.
To have these models comprehend the world as we do, or to arrive at a more comprehensive grasp of it, was one of the motivations for the DALL-E project, Murati stated to Fast Company. By exposing technology to the real world, you can see how people use it and identify its limitations. You may then utilize this knowledge to inform future technological advancements. The other aspect is that you can genuinely observe how much [the technology is] improving real-world problems or if it is merely innovative.
Murati projects strength. During a Friday company-wide meeting, she allegedly informed OpenAI staff members that “utmost confidence” was placed in OpenAI’s direction by Microsoft’s CEO and CTO, Satya Nadella and Kevin Scott, respectively. Microsoft is one of OpenAI’s significant supporters. She also restated that OpenAI had begun selecting a new CEO.
