Jonathan Lachman, the former head of special projects at OpenAI, recently left to join a new intelligence research lab founded by former OpenAI chief Mira Murati, according to two people familiar with the discussions. It’s Murati’s most high-profile hire since he left OpenAI in September of last year to start a high-profile job exploring so-called artificial general intelligence.
Murati has hired nearly 10 researchers and engineers so far from competitors including OpenAI, Character AI, and Google DeepMind. His startup is still in its early stages—it doesn’t have a name, or a firm direction for the product, 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 CEO Sam Altman was abruptly fired by the company’s board of directors in late 2023. In the chaos that followed, the board briefly appointed Murati, then serving as the company’s chief technology officer, as interim CEO.
The move hurt Altman. “I was like, that sounds really bad,” he told host Lex Fridman last March. He described Murati’s promotion as the “low point” of a leadership crisis that is briefly consuming 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 this incident. “He did a great job that weekend in a lot of chaos,” Altman told Fridman on the podcast. When Murati stepped down from the company 10 months later, he thanked Altman in his farewell letter.
“There is no good time to leave a place one loves so much,” he wrote in a letter to OpenAI staff, which he later sent to X. He added that “he is leaving because I want to create time and space to explore myself.” A month later, Reuters reported that Murati was trying to raise more than $100 million to fund a mysterious new company, though that number had not been finalized.
OpenAI’s vice president of research, Barrett Zoph, and chief research officer, Bob McGrew, both left at the same time as Murati. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s founder and chief scientist, followed suit in May of last year. He went on to found Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on AI security. Within three months, Sutskever’s startup had raised $1 billion. Anthropic, OpenAI’s biggest competitor, was also founded by former OpenAI executives and has raised billions of dollars in funding, including $8 billion from Amazon.