While at Tesla and Leap Motion, Murati was exposed to AI. She told Wired, “I very quickly believed that AGI would be the last and most important major technology that we built, and I wanted to be at the heart of it,” after applying AI to the real world at her previous positions. Back then, OpenAI and DeepMind were the only ones seriously looking into the tech, and she wanted to get in on the ground floor. In an interview with Fortune, she explained that she chose OpenAI because she resonated with the company’s mission ” to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
When Murati joined OpenAI, it was a nonprofit research lab with just a small number of employees. This starkly contrasts the company’s current state, with its over 700 employees and a handful of investors funding the project. The shift to for-profit is one Murati deemed necessary, as she noted that this large-scale research doesn’t come cheap.
She says the company’s culture has experienced a significant shift since she joined, now that it is less research and more about producing a product. But she told Wired the most important thing “was protecting the nonprofit’s mission.”
Murati also believes public testing is the way to improve generative AI. In an interview with FastCompany, she noted that although it is possible to develop the tech in a vacuum, the question becomes, “Are you actually moving in the right direction?”