Monday Motivation: Mira Murati

The CTO of $30 BILLION startup is a woman... and no one's talking about it

Everyone knows what ChatGPT is but did you know the CTO of OpenAI, the AI research lab behind it, is an Albanian engineer called Mira Murati?

There isn’t much about Mira’s biography online but from the copious interviews and talks I have watched during research, I believe Mira was born in Vlorë, Albania in 1988 and was always fascinated by STEM subjects. After pursuing a Computer Science degree at the University of Tirana, where she graduated with honors, she moved to the United States and received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Mechanical Engineering from Dartmouth College in 2012.

Mira started at OpenAI - the AI research lab behind ChatGPT, in June 2018 as VP of Applied AI and Partnerships before becoming SVP of Research, Product and Partnerships in December 2020 where she co-led the reinforcement learning team with John Schulman. Mira became CTO of OpenAI in May last year. In summary, Mira’s role at OpenAI has been to oversee efforts in commercialising OpenAI’s products and to get them out into the wild so that they can be improved through human feedback.

Prior to joining OpenAI, Mira was VP of Product & Engineering at Leap Motion from 2016–2018 . Leap Motion is  a company focused on the issue of human machine interface and it’s where Mira led the product and engineering teams.

And before Leap Motion, Mira spent three years at Tesla where she held the position of Senior Product Manager, leading the development and launch for vehicles including the Model X.