Every few weeks, OpenAI, the company behind the popular generative chatbot ChatGPT, is going through an existential crisis as high-profile executives continue to abandon ship, the latest being its chief technology officer Mira Murati.

Last month, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announced his departure to join a rival company in the artificial intelligence space — Anthropic. In May, the company’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever and former safety leader Jan Leike announced their departures. The San Francisco-based company’s president Greg Brockman has said he is stepping back from the start-up for the rest of the year. Andrej Karpathy, another co-founder, left in February to announce a new company called Eureka Labs. In fact, only two of OpenAI’s 11 founders remain — Sam Altman and Wojciech Zaremba.

Murati (she is not a co-founder), a Dartmouth-educated engineer, who worked with OpenAI for six years, took to X/Twitter to announce she was stepping away to “create the time and space to do my own exploration” without elaborating on what lies ahead.

Her decision comes at a crucial juncture for the company, which is said to be pursuing a funding round that would value it at over $150 billion. Several tech giants — like Nvidia and Apple — are reportedly in talks to invest and the round could end up being as large as $6.5 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Fresh funding is crucial as at one point, ChatGPT alone was said to be costing the company around $700,000 a day to run. So far, Microsoft has been the biggest backer of OpenAI since ChatGPT caught everyone’s attention in 2022.

Also, CEO Sam Altman is reportedly getting a seven per cent equity stake as the company legally changes to become a for-profit business.

Jim Covello, head of stock research at Goldman Sachs, recently highlighted in a paper scepticism about businesses hoping on a sufficient return on what some say could be $1 trillion in AI spending in the coming years as questions around reliability of chatbots continue to make news.

Even Altman hasn’t been spared the turmoil as a boardroom coup in November last year briefly ousted him. Though he was quickly reinstated, the incident highlighted deep rifts in the leadership.

When Altman was fired by OpenAI’s previous board of directors, Murati was for a short time named interim CEO. A few of the board members back then said they were concerned about Altman’s behaviour. Since the CEO clawed his way back, his hold over OpenAI has increased. Earlier this week, he put out a blog post that says the company could achieve “superintelligence” in the next few years.

Murati played an important role in shaping OpenAI products, like ChatGPT chatbot, DALL-E image generation software, and the recently released advanced voice mode that allows users talk to ChatGPT in real-time. The news of her departure comes a week before the company’s annual Dev Day conference in San Francisco.

Ironically, last year’s failed boardroom coup took place soon after Dev Day. Talk about taking it to the mattresses in 2024!