Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, leaves the company

Hello everyone-

Mira has been instrumental in OpenAI’s progress and growth over the past 6.5 years and has been a critical factor in our evolution from an unknown research lab to a major company.

I was saddened this morning when Mira told me she was leaving, but of course I support her decision. Over the past year she has built a strong leadership team that will continue our progress.

I also want to share that Bob and Barret have decided to leave OpenAI. Mira, Bob and Barret made these decisions independently and by mutual agreement, but the timing of Mira’s decision was such that it made sense to do this all at once now so we can work together on a smooth transition to the next generation of leadership.

I am extremely grateful to all of them for their contributions.

Being a leader at OpenAI is a lot of work. On one hand, it is a privilege to build AGI and be the fastest-growing company that can bring its cutting-edge research to hundreds of millions of people. On the other hand, it is tireless to lead a team through this time – and they have gone above and beyond for the company.

Mark will be our new Senior Vice President of Research and will now lead the research organization in partnership with Jakub as Chief Scientist. This is our long-term succession plan for Bob. While it’s happening faster than we thought, I couldn’t be more excited to have Mark step into this role. Mark obviously has deep technical expertise, but he has also learned how to be a leader and manager in impressive ways over the past few years.

Josh Achiam will take on a new role as Head of Mission Alignment, working across the company to ensure we have all the pieces (and the culture) in place to successfully accomplish the mission.

Kevin and Srinivas will continue to lead the Applied team.

Matt Knight will be our Chief Information Security Officer after a long tenure in that role, which has been our plan for some time.

Mark, Jakub, Kevin, Srinivas, Matt and Josh will report to me. I have spent most of my time over the last year working on the non-technical parts of our organization; now I’m looking forward to spending most of my time working on the technical and product parts of the company.

Tonight we’ll meet in 575 from 5:30 p.m. Mira, Bob, Barret and Mark will be there. The idea is to express our appreciation and reflect on everything we’ve accomplished together. Tomorrow we’ll all have a meeting and answer any questions. An invitation will be posted on the calendar shortly.

Leadership changes are a natural part of companies, especially those that are growing so fast and are so demanding. I won’t pretend it’s natural for this change to happen so abruptly, of course, but we’re not a normal company and I think the reasons Mira gave me (there’s never a good time, anything that isn’t abrupt would leak out, and she wanted to do this while OpenAI was on the rise) are understandable. We can both talk about this in more detail tomorrow at the all-hands session.

Thank you for all your hard work and dedication.

Sam