OpenAI would likely have fallen apart if Sam Altman hadn't returned as CEO after his brief 2023 firing, former CTO Mira Murati said at Bloomberg's Tech conference, calling the board's decision potentially catastrophic and saying she felt she had to act fast. Murati was briefly named interim CEO during the episode before the board replaced her with Emmett Shear when she moved to bring Altman back; he was reinstated within days after more than 700 of OpenAI's roughly 770 employees threatened to quit.
She argued AI governance shouldn't hinge on any one person, pointing to structure and transparency over character. Murati, who left in late 2024 to start Thinking Machines Lab (which raised $2B at a $12B valuation and has released a developer tool called Tinker), is now pitching “interaction models” built for richer, real-time human-AI collaboration.
