Jonathan Lachman, OpenAI’s previous head of special projects, 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 he left OpenAI in September last year to start the long-awaited company, which focuses on exploring so-called artificial general intelligence.
Murati has poached about 10 researchers and engineers in total so far from competitors like OpenAI, Character AI and Google DeepMind. Its startup is still in its early stages — it doesn’t have a firm name or 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 after the company’s board of directors, Sam Altman, was abruptly fired in late 2023. In the ensuing turmoil, the board briefly appointed Murati, who then serve as the company’s technology director, as interim CEO.
The move was a blow to Altman. “I said it feels really bad,” he told podcaster Lex Fridman last March. He described Murati’s promotion as “the low point” in 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 on OpenAI after the incident. “He did a great job over that weekend in a lot of chaos,” Altman told Fridman on the podcast. When Murati left the company 10 months later, he thanked Altman in his farewell letter.
“There’s never an ideal time to walk away from a place you love,” he wrote in the memo to OpenAI employees, which he later published on X. He added that “I was walking 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 more than $100 million to fund a mysterious new venture, though that number had not been finalized.
OpenAI’s vice president of research, Barret Zoph, and director of research, Bob McGrew, left at the same time as Murati. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist, followed suit in May last year. He founded Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on AI security. 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.
