OpenAI’s Mira Murati Exits, Sparks VC Interest in Potential Startup
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Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI, announced her departure last week, sparking intense interest from venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
Key points:
- Murati cited a desire for “time and space to do my own exploration” in her announcement.
- VCs are eagerly seeking meetings with Murati, anticipating she may start her own company.
- This follows a trend of former OpenAI employees founding successful startups.
Notable examples of OpenAI alumni startups include:
- Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, which raised $1 billion
- Andrej Karpathy’s Eureka Labs, focused on AI in education
- Anthropic, founded by Dario Amodei and other OpenAI researchers
- Perplexity, an AI search engine created by Aravind Srinivas
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed the departure, stating that while abrupt, Murati’s reasons “make sense” given the company’s unique nature.
This news comes amid significant developments at OpenAI:
- A $6.5 billion fundraising round led by Thrive Capital
- Restructuring from a nonprofit to a for-profit benefit corporation
- Plans to grant equity to Altman for the first time
Two other executives, Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph, also left OpenAI recently. Only two of the original 11 co-founders, Altman and Wojciech Zaremba, remain with the company.
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