There have been some big leadership changes at OpenAI this week, starting with Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati announcing her departure after 6.5 years. (If you remember, she took over as CEO when Sam Altman was fired for a weekend last year.) Alongside her, VP of Research Barret Zoph and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew also announced their exits. Mark Chen has been promoted to Senior VP of Research and Matt Knight will assume the role of Chief Information Security Officer.

The timing is interesting, but OpenAI has had its share of leadership changes. Other key depatures this year include co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever in May, co-founder John Schulman (to rival AI firm Anthropic) in August, and co-founder Greg Brockman, who took a sabbatical for the rest of the year.

These latest organizational shifts come at a critical time for the company, though, as OpenAI reportedly seeks to raise $6.5 billion at a $150 billion valuation, raising concerns about potential impacts on investor confidence.

While all this is going on, OpenAI is reportedly preparing to transition to a for-profit model, which is prompting debates about the company’s adherence to its founding mission of broadly sharing AI’s benefits. OpenAI says its core mission is unchanged.

There is quite a bit of speculation about what’s going on at OpenAI, but I don’t want to speculate. What we know is that OpenAI is shipping product: o1-preview and o1-mini last week, Advanced Voice Mode along with a bunch of other stuff this week.

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