Jonathan Lachman, the previous head of special projects at OpenAI, recently left to join a new artificial intelligence research lab founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, according to two people familiar with the discussions. It’s the most high-profile hire Murati has made since leaving OpenAI in September last year to start the much-hyped venture, which is focused on the exploration of so-called artificial general intelligence.
Murati has poached roughly 10 researchers and engineers in total so far from competitors including OpenAI, Character AI, and Google DeepMind. Her startup is still in its early stages—it doesn’t have a name, nor a firm product direction, according to two people familiar with the company.
Murati and Lachman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed Lachman’s departure.
Murati departed OpenAI less than a year after CEO Sam Altman was abruptly fired by the company’s board of directors in late 2023. In the turmoil that followed, the board briefly appointed Murati, who then 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 after more than 730 OpenAI employees threatened to quit, Altman was reinstated as CEO.
Altman and Murati continued to work closely together at OpenAI after the incident. “She did a great job during that weekend in a lot of chaos,” Altman told Fridman on the podcast. When Murati stepped down from the company 10 months later, she thanked Altman in her goodbye letter.
“There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes,” she wrote in the note to OpenAI employees, which she later posted on X. She added that she was “stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” A month later, Reuters reported that Murati was trying to raise over $100 million to fund a mysterious new company, though that figure had not been finalized.
OpenAI’s vice president of research, Barret Zoph, and chief research officer, Bob McGrew, both left around the same time as Murati. Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI cofounder and chief scientist, followed suit in May of last year. He went on to found Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on AI safety. Within 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.