In a surprising move, OpenAI abruptly fired Sam Altman, its CEO and member of its board of directors, and installed CTO Mira Murati as interim CEO. But who is Mira Murati?
Murati, a mechanical engineering graduate from Dartmouth College, previously worked as an intern at Goldman Sachs and then at Zodiac Aerospace, the French aerospace group. She spent three years at Tesla as a senior product manager for Model
In 2016, Murati joined Leap Motion, a startup that builds hand and finger tracking motion sensors for PCs, as vice president of product and engineering. Murati wanted the experience of interacting with a computer to be "as intuitive as playing with a ball." said to Fast Company in an interview. But he soon realized that he was too early for the technology, which was based on a virtual reality device.
In 2018, Murati joined OpenAI as vice president of partnerships and applied artificial intelligence. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, she led the company's work on AI-powered viral chatbot ChatGPT, text-to-image AI DALL-E, and code generation system Codex, which powers GitHub's Copilot product. .
So what kind of interim CEO will Murati be? Perhaps he will choose not to cause trouble while the OpenAI board of directors searches for a permanent replacement. But from what Murati said in interviews, it's clear that he sees multimodal models — that is, models like OpenAI's GPT-4 with Vision, which can understand the context of images and text — as the future of the enterprise and one one of the most promising paths towards ultra-capable AI. Additionally, Murati seems to be a big believer in testing this type of AI openly to catch bugs and discover potentially novel use cases.
"One of the reasons we wanted to implement DALL-E was to get to a more robust understanding of the world, so that these models understand the world like we do," Murati told Fast Company. “You put technology in contact with reality, you see how people use it, what the limitations are, you learn from that and it can be reintroduced into technological development. The other dimension is that you can really see how much technology move the needle in solving real-world problems or if it is novel.”
The strength that Murati projects is very valuable. During a company-wide meeting on Friday, she as reported He told OpenAI employees that Satya Nadella and Kevin Scott, CEO and CTO, respectively, of Microsoft, one of OpenAI's largest backers, had "the utmost confidence" in OpenAI's direction. And he reiterated that OpenAI was beginning a search for a new CEO.
