Who is Mira Murati, OpenAI's new interim CEO?
In a surprising move, OpenAI today abruptly fired Sam Altman, its CEO and a member of its board of directors, and installed CTO Mira Murati as interim CEO. But who, exactly, is Mira Murati?
Murati, who has a degree in mechanical engineering 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 of the Model X, the automaker's crossover SUV, during which Tesla released early versions of Autopilot, its AI-enabled driver-assistance software.
Mira Murati's Journey
In 2016, Murati joined Leap Motion, a startup building hand- and finger-tracking motion sensors for PCs, as VP of product and engineering. She aspired to make the experience of interacting with a computer as intuitive as playing with a ball, as she told Fast Company in an interview. However, she soon realized that the technology, relying on a VR headset, was ahead of its time.
The Vision of Mira Murati
What kind of leader will Murati be as the interim CEO of OpenAI? While the board of directors searches for a permanent replacement, Murati's focus on multimodal models, like OpenAI's GPT-4 with Vision, signals her vision for the company's future. She believes these models, capable of understanding both images and text, are pivotal for achieving ultra-capable AI.
During a companywide meeting, Murati reportedly mentioned that Microsoft's CEO and CTO expressed "utmost confidence" in OpenAI's trajectory. She reassured employees that the search for a new CEO was underway.
For more insights on Sam Altman’s departure from OpenAI, check out these articles:
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