OpenAI’s CTO Mira Morati posted on X on Wednesday, Moratti said she is leaving the company to pursue her own explorations, after more than six years at the AI startup.
“After much thought, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she said in the post. “There is no perfect time to walk away from a place you hold dear, but now feels like the right moment.”
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment further, directing TechCrunch to Moratti’s tweet.
CEO Sam Altman responded to Moratti’s tweet by thanking him in another tweet. mail.
“We’ll have more to say about our transition plans soon, but for now, I want to take this opportunity to say thank you,” Altman said.
The decision comes just one week before OpenAI DevDay, the annual developer conference.
When Altman was abruptly ousted late last year by OpenAI’s former board, the board briefly appointed Moratti as interim CEO. It is said Among them, along with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who reached out to the rest of the board before Altman’s ouster to express concerns about his behavior.
Altman is increasingly asserting his control over OpenAI and its image. On Monday, he wrote a blog post asserting, among other things, that OpenAI could achieve “superintelligence” in the next few years.
Moratti joined OpenAI in 2018 as vice president of applied AI and partnerships. Promoted to CTO in 2022, she led the company’s work on the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT, the AI text-to-image program DALL-E, and the code generation system Codex, which powers GitHub’s Copilot product.
Moratti, who earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth College, previously worked as an intern at Goldman Sachs and then at Zodiac Aerospace, a French aerospace group. She spent three years at Tesla as a senior product manager for the Model X, the automaker’s SUV, during which time Tesla rolled out early versions of Autopilot, its AI-powered driver assistance software.
In 2016, Moratti joined Leap Motion, a startup that builds hand and finger-tracking motion sensors for computers, as vice president of product and engineering. Moratti wanted to make the experience of interacting with a computer “as intuitive as playing with a ball.” He said In an interview with Fast Company, she realized that the technology behind the VR headset was very early.
This is a developing story. Follow us for updates.
“Devoted student. Bacon advocate. Beer scholar. Troublemaker. Falls down a lot. Typical coffee enthusiast.”