Former CEO of OpenAI Mira Murati says it may take decades, but AI systems will eventually perform a wide range of cognitive tasks as well as humans—a future technological milestone commonly known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
“Right now, it feels pretty achievable,” Muratti said at WIRED’s The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Tuesday. In her first interview since stepping down as OpenAI’s chief technology officer in September, Muratti told WIRED’s Stephen Levy that she’s not overly concerned about recent talk in the AI industry that developing more powerful generative AI models is proving challenging.
“The current evidence suggests that progress is likely to continue,” Muratti said. “There is not much evidence to the contrary. It is not certain whether we need new ideas to get to AGI-level systems. I am quite optimistic that progress will continue.”
The remarks reflect her continued interest in trying to find a way to introduce increasingly capable AI systems to the world, despite the split from OpenAI. Reuters reported in October that Muratti was founding his own AI startup to develop proprietary models and that it could raise more than $100 million in venture capital funding. On Tuesday, Muratti declined to elaborate on the venture.
“I understand what it’s going to look like,” she said. “I am right now.”
Muratti started in the aerospace industry and then at Elon Musk’s Tesla, where she worked on the Model S and Model X electric cars. She also led product and engineering at virtual reality startup Leap Motion before joining OpenAI in 2018. and help manage services such as ChatGPT and Dall-E. She became one of OpenAI’s top executives and was briefly at the helm last year while board members grappled with the fate of CEO Sam Altman.
When Muratti resigned, Altman credited her for providing support during difficult times and described her as instrumental to OpenAI’s growth.
Muratti did not publicly specify why she left OpenAI, other than to say that the time was deemed appropriate for personal research. Dozens of early OpenAI employees have left the nonprofit in recent years, some out of frustration with Altman’s increasing focus on revenue generation rather than purely academic research. Muratti told WIRED’s Levy that there has been “too much obsessing” about the exits and not enough about the nature of AI development.
She pointed to work on producing synthetic data to train models and increasing investment in computing infrastructure to feed them as important areas to pursue. Breakthroughs in these areas will enable AGI one day, she said. But not everything is technological. “This technology is not inherently good or bad,” she said. “It comes with both sides.” It’s up to society, Muratti said, to collectively continue to steer models toward good — so we’re well prepared for the day AGI comes.
