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Jonathan Lachman, the former head of special operations 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 the highest-profile hire Murati has made since then quit OpenAI in September last year to begin a high-speed operation, which focuses on the search for the so-called Artificial General Intelligence.
Murati has killed about 10 researchers and engineers so far from competitors including OpenAI, Character AI, and Google DeepMind. The startup is still in the early stages — there’s no name, or set product guidelines, according to two people familiar with the company.
Murati and Lachman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed Lachman’s departure.
Murati left OpenAI less than a year later CEO Sam Altman was suddenly fired and the company’s board of directors at the end of 2023. In the chaos that followed, the board briefly appointed Murati, who had been the company’s chief technology officer, as interim CEO.
The move was painful for Altman. “I was like, that sounds really good,” he told podcaster Lex Fridman last March. He also described Murati’s promotion as “a low point” in a major leadership crisis that briefly destroyed OpenAI. Less than a week later and after that than 730 OpenAI employees threatened to quit, Altman was reinstated as CEO.
Altman and Murati continued to work together at OpenAI after the incident. “He did a great job that weekend in the chaos,” Altman told Fridman on the podcast. When Murati resigned after 10 months, he thanked Altman in his farewell letter.
“There is never a good time to leave a place one loves,” he wrote in the letter to the OpenAI staff, which later written on X. He added that he is “leaving because I want to make time and space to explore on my own.” A month later, Reuters reported that Murati was trying to raise more than $100 million to support the amazing new company, although the number had not yet been finalized.
OpenAI’s vice president of research, Barret Zoph, and chief research officer, Bob McGrew, both left at the same time like Murat. Ilya Sutskever, founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, followed suit in May last year. He went on to found Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on AI security. Within three months, Sutskever started again earned $1 billion. Anthropic, OpenAI’s main competitor, was also founded by former OpenAI executives and has raised billions of dollars in funding, including $8 billion from Amazon.
