In response, Altman expressed \u201ctremendous gratitude\u201d for Murati\u2019s contributions,\u00a0writing<\/a>, \u201cIt\u2019s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally.\u201d He also said that he would share more with employees about transition plans soon.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Murati does not yet have a exit date at the company, according to a person familiar with the matter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n She is still speaking with OpenAI\u2019s leadership about plans for her replacement, including the timeline. In the post, she wrote, \u201cFor now, my primary focus is doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we\u2019ve built.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Representatives for OpenAI and Murati declined to provide further comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization with the goal of building artificial intelligence that would be safe and beneficial to humanity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The company created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 in order to help fund the high costs of AI model development, and has since drawn billions in outside investment from Microsoft and others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This month, Bloomberg\u00a0reported\u00a0that OpenAI is currently working to raise $6.5 billion (R112 billion) at a $150 billion (R2.6 trillion) valuation, making it one of the most valuable startups in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In keeping with the company\u2019s nonprofit origins, Altman had famously not taken equity, stressing that the company was meant to broadly benefit society, and that he\u00a0had enough money. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But he has also occasionally said in interviews that he wished he had taken equity so that people would stop asking him about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reuters earlier\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0on the company\u2019s plan to restructure and give Altman equity for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Wednesday, many employees were shocked by the announcement of Murati\u2019s departure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On the company\u2019s internal Slack channel, multiple OpenAI employees responded to the news with a \u201cWTF\u201d emoji, according to a person familiar with the matter.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Murati, an Albanian-born Dartmouth-educated engineer, played a key role in shepherding major product releases, including OpenAI\u2019s popular ChatGPT chatbot, its DALL-E image generation software, and its recently released advanced voice mode that lets users talk to ChatGPT in essentially real time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This spring, Murati came under fire for saying in an\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0with the Wall Street Journal that she wasn\u2019t sure whether Sora, a text-to-video generator that OpenAI has shown off but not yet released, was trained on user-generated videos from YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n YouTube CEO Neal Mohan later told Bloomberg that such a use of YouTube content would be an infraction of the platform\u2019s<\/span> terms of service.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Altman\u2019s ouster, Murati gained a higher profile when she was appointed as interim CEO \u2014 but she quickly joined a group of executives pushing for Altman to be reinstated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Her departure marks the latest\u00a0executive exit\u00a0at OpenAI since Altman\u2019s firing and rehiring last year. Ilya Sutskever, the company\u2019s chief scientist, left\u00a0in May. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In August, co-founder Greg Brockman said he would go on leave until the end of the year and researcher John Schulman left for AI rival Anthropic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The departures leave only two members of OpenAI\u2019s original founding team at the startup: Altman and\u00a0Wojciech Zaremba.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n In her post on X, the text of which she earlier sent to employees at the company, Murati said she was grateful to have worked with the OpenAI team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTogether we\u2019ve pushed the boundaries of scientific understanding in our quest to improve human well-being,\u201d she wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company currently has about 1,700 employees, more than double the roughly 770 it had in late 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Altman subsequently announced additional changes to OpenAI\u2019s management. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In a memo to OpenAI he also\u00a0posted<\/a>\u00a0to X on Wednesday, he wrote that Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew is leaving, along with Barret Zoph, a vice president of research who worked on products like ChatGPT.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Sam-Altman_OpenAI-CEO-800x533.jpg\")