(Bloomberg) — OpenAI is considering becoming a for-profit company and giving Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman equity in the artificial intelligence startup for the first time, according to people familiar with the matter.
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One scenario being discussed is becoming a B Corp, a type of for-profit company that is also meant to benefit society, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous discussing private information. OpenAI did not immediately respond to request for comment on the restructuring plans.
OpenAI is mulling these changes against the backdrop of an an exodus of senior managers. Mira Murati said on Wednesday she is leaving the company, a surprise move that marks the latest high-profile departure from the startup.
The company has been in a state of flux since last November, when it briefly fired and rehired Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman. In the following months, OpenAI has lost multiple managers and shifted the structure of some of its teams.
In a statement on X, Murati said she was “stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” In response, Altman expressed “tremendous gratitude” for what Murati helped the company accomplish, writing, “It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally.” He also said that he would share more with employees about transition plans soon.
Representatives for OpenAI and Murati declined to provide further comment beyond the posts.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization with the goal of building artificial intelligence that would be safe and beneficial to humanity. The company created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 in order to help fund the high costs of AI model development, and has since drawn billions in outside investment from Microsoft Corp. and others. This month, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI is currently working to raise $6.5 billion at a $150 billion valuation, making it one of the most valuable startups in the world.
On Wednesday, many employees were shocked by the announcement of Murati’s departure. On the company’s internal Slack channel, multiple OpenAI employees responded to the news with a “wtf” emoji, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Murati, an Albanian-born Dartmouth-educated engineer, played a key role in shepherding major product releases, including OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot, its DALL-E image generation software, and its recently released advanced voice mode that lets users talk to ChatGPT in essentially real time.
This spring, Murati came under fire for saying in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that she wasn’t sure whether Sora, a text-to-video generator that OpenAI has showed off but not yet released, was trained on user-generated videos from YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Such a use of YouTube content would be an infraction of the platform’s terms of service, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan later told Bloomberg.
After Altman’s ouster, Murati gained a higher profile after being appointed as interim CEO — but she quickly joined a group of executives pushing for Altman to be reinstated.
Her departure marks the latest executive exit at the company since Altman’s firing and rehiring last year. Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist, left in May. In August, co-founder Greg Brockman said he would go on leave until the end of the year and researcher John Schulman left for AI rival Anthropic. The departures leave only two members of OpenAI’s original founding team at the company: Altman and Wojciech Zaremba.
In her post on X, the text of which she earlier sent to employees at the company, Murati said she was grateful to have worked with the OpenAI team. “Together we’ve pushed the boundaries of scientific understanding in our quest to improve human well-being,” she wrote.
(Updates with context starting in the first paragraph.)
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