Jonathan Lachman is the former head of special projects for OpenAI. He recently left the company to join the new artificial intelligence lab founded by Mira Murati, a former OpenAI executive. It’s the highest-profile hire Murati made since she left OpenAI in September of last year to launch the much-hyped project, which is centered on the exploration and development of artificial general intelligence.
Murati’s team has recruited roughly 10 researchers and developers from OpenAI, Character AI and Google DeepMind. According to two people who are familiar with her startup, it is still in its very early stages. It does not yet have a name or a clear product direction.
Murati or Lachman did NOT respond to requests for comments. OpenAI confirmed Lachman’s departure.
Murati left OpenAI in less than a month after CEO Sam Altman had been abruptly dismissed by the company’s Board of Directors at the end of 2023. In the chaos that followed, the board briefly named Murati, then the company’s Chief Technology Officer, as interim CEO. Altman was hurt by the move
. He told Lex Fridman, a podcaster, in March of last year that he felt “really bad”.He called Murati’s promotion “the lowpoint” of the dramatic leadership crises that briefly consumed OpenAI. Altman was reinstated to his position as CEO less than a week after the dramatic leadership crisis that briefly consumed OpenAI. Altman and Murati worked closely together at OpenAI following the incident. Altman said on the podcast that Murati did a good job in the chaos of that weekend. Altman was thanked in Murati’s goodbye letterwhen she resigned from the company ten months later.
She wrote to OpenAI employees that “there’s never an optimal time to leave a place you love,” in a note she posted on X.Later, she said: “There’s no ideal time to leave a place you love.” She said that she was “stepping aside because I want to create time and space to do[my own]exploration”. A month later Reuters reported that Murati had been trying to raise $100 million for a mysterious, new company. However, the figure was not finalized.
OpenAI Vice President of Research, Barret Zoph, and Chief Research Officer, Bob McGrew both left around the time Murati did. Ilya Sutskever an OpenAI cofounder, chief scientist and cofounder, followed suit in May last year. He founded Safe Superintelligence, an AI safety startup. Sutskever raised $1 billion in three months for his startup. Anthropic is a major OpenAI rival founded by former OpenAI executives. It has raised billions in funding including $8 billion from Amazon.