Jonathan Lachman, the former head of special projects at OpenAI, recently left to join a new artificial intelligence research lab founded by former OpenAI director Mira Murati, according to two people familiar with the matter. with discussions. This is the most high-profile hire Murati has made since then left OpenAI last September to start a much-hyped venture focused on exploring the so-called artificial general intelligence.
To date, Murati has recruited a total of about 10 researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Character AI and Google DeepMind. Her startup is still in its early stages, according to two people familiar with the company. It doesn't have a name or a solid product direction yet.
Murati and Lachman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed Lachman's departure.
Murati left OpenAI less than a year later CEO Sam Altman was suddenly fired by the company's board of directors in late 2023. In the chaos that followed, the board briefly appointed Murati, who at the time served as the company's chief technology officer, as CEO temporary.
The move is a blow to Altman. “I was like, that feels really bad,” he told podcaster Lex Fridman last March. He described Murati's promotion as the “low point” of the dramatic leadership crisis that has devastated OpenAI in a short period of time. Less than a week later and after that more 730 OpenAI employees threatened to quit, Altman was reinstated as CEO
Altman and Murati continued to work closely together at OpenAI after the incident. “She did really well that weekend in the chaos,” Altman told Fridman on the podcast. When Murati left the company 10 months later, she thanked Altman in her farewell letter.
“There is never an ideal time to leave a place one loves,” she wrote in a note to OpenAI staff, which she later wrote. posted on X. She added that she “gave up because I wanted to create the time and space to go on my own journey of discovery.” One month later, Reuters reported that Murati is trying to raise more than $100 million to fund a mysterious new company, although that figure has yet to be decided.
OpenAI's vice president of research, Barret Zoph, and director of research, Bob McGrew, have both left around the same time like Murati. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, follow in May last year. He went on to found Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on AI safety. Within three months, Sutskever's startup was there raised 1 billion USD. Anthropic, a major OpenAI competitor, was also founded by former OpenAI executives and has raised billions of dollars in funding, including $8 billion from Amazon.