After Sam Altman's surprise sacking from OpenAI on Friday, the AI company has announced that Mira Murati will fill the gap as interim Chief Executive Officer (CEO) until a replacement is found. A relative unknown outside of Silicon Valley, many interested in the artificial intelligence (AI) space are rightfully wondering who she is. Let's find out what we know so far.
Who are you?
Mira Murati was born in Albania but moved to Vancouver, Canada when she was 16 years old under a scholarship at an international school. After graduating, she studied at Dartmouth College and completed a mechanical engineering degree. After completing her studies, Murati worked as an intern at Goldman Sachs and then at the French aerospace group Zodiac Aerospace.
She later spent a few years at Tesla as a senior product manager for the company's Model X. During her time there; Tesla released early versions of its Autopilot function. In 2016, Murati joined Leap Motion as VP of product and engineering, a startup building hand- and finger-tracking motion sensors for PCs.
During her time there, Murati aimed to create a computer interface that could be as easy to use as playing with a ball, as she mentioned in an interview with Fast Company. However, she later realized that the technology she was working on, which relied on a VR headset, was too ahead of its time.
In 2018, Murati joined OpenAI as the Vice President of Applied AI and Partnerships. She was later promoted to the role of Chief Technology Officer in 2022. As the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), she led OpenAI's efforts in developing several groundbreaking AI-powered products, including the viral chatbot ChatGPT, the text-to-image system DALL-E, and the code-generating technology Codex, which now powers GitHub's Copilot tool.
She is a tech-savvy person and an artist at heart, reports Tech Crunch. She likes to explore her artistic side by drawing inspiration from poetry, science fiction movies, and rock bands. In an interview with Time Magazine, she mentioned that her favorite song for inspiration is "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead. She admires this song for its multilayered structure and ability to touch upon themes related to society and technology.
She loves Rainer Maria Rilke's "Duino Elegies" and is still captivated by "2001: A Space Odyssey," which she finds evocative in its imagery and music.
Steady the ship
"A member of OpenAI's leadership team for five years, Mira has played a critical role in OpenAI's evolution into a global AI leader. She brings a unique skill set, understanding of the company's values, operations, and business, and already leads the company's research, product, and safety functions," OpenAI stated in an official statement.
It's uncertain what kind of interim CEO Murati will be, but she will most likely opt to maintain the status quo while OpenAI's board hunts for a permanent replacement. However, Murati has expressed her belief in multimodal models like OpenAI's GPT-4 with Vision, which can understand the context of images and text.
She sees this technology as the company's future and one of the most promising paths to highly advanced AI. Murati also believes in openly testing this type of AI to identify potential flaws and discover new and innovative use cases.
Originally published on Interesting Engineering : Original article