Jonathan Lachman, the previous head of special projects at OpenAI, recently left to join a new artificial intelligence research lab founded by former OpenAI CEO Mira Murati, according to two people familiar with the discussions. It is Murati’s most prominent engagement since then is leaving OpenAI last September launch the much-hyped venture, which is focused on the research of the so-called artificial general intelligence.
Murati has so far poached roughly 10 researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Character AI and Google DeepMind. Her startup is still in its early stages—it has no name, no firm product direction, according to two people familiar with the company.
Murati and Lachman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed Lachman’s departure.
Murati left OpenAI less than a year after CEO Sam Altman was suddenly fired by the company’s board of directors in late 2023. In the ensuing turmoil, the board briefly named Murati, who was then the company’s chief technology officer, as interim CEO.
The move was a blow to Altman. “I thought it was very bad,” he told podcaster Lex Fridman last March. He described Murati’s promotion as a “low point” in a dramatic leadership crisis that briefly engulfed OpenAI. Less than a week later and after more than 730 OpenAI employees threatened to quit, Altman was reinstated as CEO.
Altman and Murati continued to work closely together at OpenAI after the incident. “She did a great job during that weekend of great chaos,” Altman told Fridman on the podcast. When Murati resigned from the company 10 months later, she thanked Altman in her farewell letter.
“It’s never an ideal time to move away from a place you love,” she wrote in a message to OpenAI employees, which she later published on X. She added that “she is giving up because I want to create time and space for my own research”. A month later, Reuters reported that Murati was trying to raise more than $100 million in funding for a mysterious new company, although that figure had not been finalized.
OpenAI’s VP of Research, Barret Zoph, and Principal Investigator, Bob McGrew, both left around the same time like Murat. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, followed suit in May last year. He then founded Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on artificial intelligence security. Within three months, Sutskever’s startup had raised a billion dollars. Anthropic, a major OpenAI competitor, was also founded by former OpenAI executives and has raised billions of dollars in funding, including $8 billion from Amazon.