OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati posted on X on Wednesday saying she is leaving the company. Murati said she is stepping away to do her own exploration, after more than six years at the company.

"After much reflection, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI," she said in the post. "There's never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right."

An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment further, directing TechCrunch to Murati's tweet.

CEO Sam Altman responded to Murati's tweet by thanking her in another post.

"We’ll say more about the transition plans soon, but for now, I want to take a moment to just feel thanks," said Altman.

The decision comes just a week before OpenAI's Dev Day, its annual developer conference.

Murati, who has a degree in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth College, previously worked as an intern at Goldman Sachs and then at Zodiac Aerospace, the French aerospace group. She spent three years at Tesla as a senior product manager of the Model X, the automaker’s crossover SUV, during which Tesla released early versions of Autopilot, its AI-enabled driver-assistance software.

In 2016, Murati joined Leap Motion, a startup building hand- and finger-tracking motion sensors for PCs, as VP of product and engineering. Murati wanted to make the experience of interacting with a computer “as intuitive as playing with a ball,” she told Fast Company in an interview. But she soon realized that the tech, which relied on a VR headset, was too early.

In 2018, Murati came to OpenAI as VP of applied AI and partnerships. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, she led the company’s work on the viral AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E and the code-generating system Codex, which powers GitHub’s Copilot product.

When Altman was abruptly fired late last year by OpenAI's then-board of directors, the board briefly installed Murati as interim CEO.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/25/openai-cto-mira-murati-says-shes-leaving-the-company/