Jonathan Lachman, OpenAI’s previous head of special projects, recently left to join a new artificial intelligence research lab founded by former OpenAI executive Meera Murthy, according to two people familiar with the discussions. It has been employed by the most high-profile murti Leaving OpenAI in September last year To start the much-hyped venture, which is focused on the discovery of the so-called Artificial general intelligence.
Murthy has poached about 10 researchers and engineers in total 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, nor a firm product direction, according to two people familiar with the company.
Murthy and Lachman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed Lachman’s departure.
Murthy left OpenAI after less than a year CEO Sam Altman was suddenly fired by the company’s board of directors in late 2023. In the turmoil that followed, the board briefly appointed Murthy, who served as the company’s chief technology officer at the time, as interim CEO.
The move was a blow to Altman. “I was like, this feels so bad,” He told podcaster Lex Friedman last March. He described Murthy’s promotion as the “low point” of the dramatic leadership crisis that briefly consumed OpenAI. Less than a week later and later more than After 730 OpenAI employees threatened to quit, Altman was reinstated as CEO.
Altman and Murthy continued to work together at OpenAI after the incident. “He did a great job in the chaos that weekend,” Altman told Friedman on the podcast. “When Murthy resigned from the company 10 months later, he was Thanked Altman in his farewell letter.
“There is never an ideal time to walk away from a place one values,” he later wrote in a note to OpenAI employees. Posted on X. She added that she was “moving away because I want to make time and space to do my own research.” a month later, Reuters reported that Murthy was trying to raise more than $100 million to fund a mysterious new company, though that figure has not been finalized.
OpenAI’s vice president of research, Barrett Zoff, and chief research officer, Bob McGrew, both departed. Around the same time As an idol. Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist, followed by In May last year. He founded Secure Superintelligence, a startup focused on AI security. Within three months, Stuskever was launched 1 billion dollars collected. 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.
