Mira Murati, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of OpenAI, has been appointed as the interim CEO of the company after the surprising termination of CEO Sam Altman. Murati holds a degree in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth College and has a diverse background, including roles at Tesla as Senior Product Manager for Model X and at Leap Motion as Vice President of Product and Engineering. She joined OpenAI in 2018 as Vice President of Applied AI and Partnerships, later becoming CTO in 2022.

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Murati has been instrumental in leading OpenAI’s work on various AI projects, including the development of the viral AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E, and the code-generating system Codex, which powers GitHub’s Copilot product. As the interim CEO, she has expressed a belief in the future of multimodal models, such as GPT-4 with Vision, which can understand both image and text context. Murati emphasizes the importance of openly testing AI to identify bugs and discover new applications.

During a companywide meeting, Murati reassured OpenAI employees that Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella and CTO Kevin Scott, two of OpenAI’s major backers, have “utmost confidence” in the company’s direction. As OpenAI searches for a new permanent CEO, Murati is leading the company through this transition period.