Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and a board of directors member, was unceremoniously removed today in an unexpected move, and CTO Mira Murati was named interim CEO. However, precisely who is Mira Murati?
Murati, a Dartmouth College graduate in mechanical engineering, previously interned at Goldman Sachs and later at the French aerospace firm Zodiac Aerospace. Afterward, she dedicated three years to Tesla as a senior product manager, directing the development of the Model X, an AI-infused crossover SUV. Her involvement extended to implementing initial versions of the Autopilot driver-assistance software.
As VP of product and engineering, Murati joined Leap Motion in 2016, a startup developing motion sensors for PCs that tracked motion with the hands and fingers. In an interview with Fast Company, Murati stated that she aimed to make using a computer “as intuitive as playing with a ball.” However, she quickly concluded that the VR headset-based technology needed to be more nascent.
In 2018, Murati became a vice president of partnerships and applied AI at OpenAI. After being promoted to Chief Technology Officer in 2022, she oversaw the creation of the company’s text-to-image AI DALL-E, the well-liked AI chatbot ChatGPT, and the code-generating system Codex, which powers GitHub’s Copilot product.
In the interim, what sort of CEO will Murati be? While the OpenAI board of directors searches for a long-term replacement, she won’t want to stir up controversies. Nonetheless, Murati’s assessment during the interview suggests that multimodal models—that is, models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 with Vision, which can understand both textual and visual context—are the company’s most excellent chance of developing ultra-capable AI. Furthermore, it appears that Murati supports publicly testing this AI to find flaws and possibly even discover new uses.
According to Murati, one of the goals of the DALL-E project was to have these models understand the world as we do or to arrive at a more thorough understanding of it. You may examine how people utilize technology and recognize its limitations by exposing technology to the real world. After that, you may use this information to guide future technological developments. The other is that, as far as technology is concerned, you can see how much it addresses real-world problems or if it is just inventive.
Murati projects strength. During a Friday company-wide meeting, she allegedly informed OpenAI staff members that “utmost confidence” was placed in OpenAI’s direction by Microsoft’s CEO and CTO, Satya Nadella and Kevin Scott, respectively. Microsoft is one of OpenAI’s significant supporters. She also restated that OpenAI had begun selecting a new CEO.
[Source of Information: Techcrunch.com]
