Mira Murati
OpenAI's CTO, the brains behind ChatGPT
Mira Murati is the Albanian-born mechanical engineer who, as CTO of OpenAI, is best known for leading the development of ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, and its subsequent enhancements. Born in Vlorë in 1988, she moved to Canada at 16 years old, interned at Goldman Sachs when 23, spent two years at Zodiac Aerospace, followed by three years at Tesla as a senior product manager of Model X before joining Leap Motion. In 2018 in 2018, she joined OpenAI, becoming its chief technology officer, where she leads the company's work on ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Codex.
Sam Altman tends to get all the publicity, particularly as Open AI’s ChatGPT launched in November 2022, reaching 100 million users in 5 days. But his CTO, Murati is responsible for most if the development behind the revolutionary AI.
Through her dedication to democratising AI, her ability to bring together diverse teams, and the fearlessness with which she tackles technical challenges, Murati has helped to scale OpenAI from a startup to one of the most important AI companies in the world.
She has a demonstrated ability to assemble teams with technical expertise, commercial acumen, and a deep appreciation for the importance of mission. As a result she has helped build some of the most exciting AI technologies we’ve ever seen, including ChatGPT, DALL-E, and GPT-4.
During an interview with Time Magazine, Mira Murati commented on ChatGPT clearing exams, “We weren’t anticipating this level of excitement from putting our child in the world. We, in fact, even had some trepidation about putting it out there. I’m curious to see the areas where it’ll start generating utility for people and not just novelty and pure curiosity.”
Talking about the chatbot’s current capabilities, she said, “Right now, it’s in the research review stage, so I don’t want to speak with high confidence on what problems it is solving. But I think that we can see that it has the potential to really revolutionize the way we learn. People are in classrooms of, say, 30 people. Everyone has different backgrounds, ways of learning, and everyone is getting basically the same curriculum. With tools like ChatGPT, you can endlessly converse with a model to understand a concept in a way that is catered to your level of understanding. It has immense potential to help us with personalized education.”
“AI can be misused, or it can be used by bad actors. So, then there are questions about how you govern the use of this technology globally. How do you govern the use of AI in a way that’s aligned with human values? It’s important for OpenAI and companies like ours to bring this into the public consciousness in a way that’s controlled and responsible. But we’re a small group of people and we need a ton more input in this system and a lot more input that goes beyond the technologies-—definitely regulators and governments and everyone else,” she elaborated, while speaking on the need for regulating the world of AI.
In a recent interview, she said that the song she feels identified with is Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ and her favourite book and movie are ‘Duino Elegies’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ respectively.