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Jonathan Lachman, the former head of special projects at OpenAI, has recently joined a new artificial intelligence research lab founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, according to two people familiar with the discussions. It is the highest hire Murati has made since abandoned OpenAI in September of last year to start the much-hyped company, which is focused on the exploration of the so-called artificial general intelligence.
Murati has driven about 10 researchers and engineers in total to far from competitors including OpenAI, Character AI and Google DeepMind. His 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 later CEO Sam Altman was abruptly fired from the company’s board of directors at the end of 2023. In the turmoil that followed, the board briefly appointed Murati, who served as the company’s chief technology officer, as interim CEO.
The move was a blow to Altman. “I was like, that feels really bad,” he told podcaster Lex Fridman last March. He described Murati’s promotion as “the low point” of the dramatic leadership crisis that briefly consumed OpenAI. Less than a week later and then more than 730 OpenAI employees threatened to quit, Altman was reinstated as CEO.
Altman and Murati continued to work together on OpenAI after the incident. “He did a great job during that weekend in a lot of chaos,” Altman told Fridman on the podcast. When Murati left the company 10 months later, she thanked Altman in his farewell letter.
“There is never an ideal time to move away from a place you love,” he wrote in the note to OpenAI employees, which he later wrote. published on X. She added that she is “moving away because I want to create the time and space to do my exploration.” A month later, Reuters reported that Murati was trying to raise more than $100 million to finance a new mysterious company, although that figure had not been finalized.
OpenAI’s vice president of research, Barret Zoph, and chief research officer, Bob McGrew, are both parties about the same time like Murat. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist, followed in May of last year. He went on to found Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on AI security. In three months, Sutskever’s startup had raised $1 billion. 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.
