Who Is Mira Murati, OpenAI's New CEO? | Hacker News Reader

Who Is Mira Murati, OpenAI's New CEO?

wired.com

68 pointspranay0136 comments

Having read the article I do get the feeling that safety is an underlying current in most of her answers. This certainly gives weight to this being a safety first camp vs growth first camp theory. I hope they don't slow down the pace of innovation too much as there are many startups just waiting for a few improvements here or there before something else becomes viable. And given her answer to the following question I am somewhat optimistic:

Steven: "[...] By putting things like GPT-4 in the wild, it’s almost like you’re forcing the public to deal with those issues [...]"

Mira: "[...] especially as the technological progress continues to be so rapid. It's futile to resist it. I think it's important to embrace it and figure out how it's going to go well."

Context for those inclined to ignore this as something that couldn't possibly have been researched in the time aloted:

“This interview was conducted in July 2023 for WIRED’s cover story on OpenAI. It is being published today after Sam Altman’s sudden departure to provide a glimpse at the thinking of the powerful AI company’s new boss.”

https://archive.is/inaoT

No experience as a builder really

Not necessary if you can make sure the builders can do their jobs without disturbance.

Good news is the team at OpenAI consists of more people than just herself.

It has been established that visionaries don't always need to come from a coding background. Often those who aren't can offer diverse viewpoints that are not restricted by the current technology limitations.

“My background is in engineering, and I worked in aerospace, automotive, VR, and AR. Both in my time at Tesla [where she shepherded the Model X], and at a VR company [Leap Motion] I was doing applications of AI in the real world.”

Coincidentally, that reads like the LinkedIn of some of the most utterly clueless, dishonest, resume padding colleagues I've worked with. Not saying that's what's going on here, though I'd urge caution with taking statements like this at face value.

did your colleagues ship chatgpt

Right, the CTO that of the leading artificial intelligence company in the world, which just got the CEO position, is really just padding her LinkedIn. /s

Obviously an interview is an opportunity to promote herself and her achievements, but that doesn't make it remotely similar to a self-important blowhard writing about themselves in a place that precisely three other people will ever read, and zero other people will take seriously.

I mean she’s obvious not.

If anything the resume padders are copying her style.

It sounds like she had a lot of experience with finite state machines and then using expert systems to tie neural network/fuzzy logic systems together. All those companies were really relevant to the robotics/sensor fusion/IoT crowd which oversaw the prelude to this AI renaissance.

That's what I based my comment on. She was in Tesla for 3 years and her whole working experience has been a total of only 11 or 12 years.

You got downvoted fast, but I too agree, CTO should be technical people. There are enough people's people in the other seats.

She should understand every layer of the cake, and by the interview I can take that's not the case (excited about Italian translation).

> CTO should be technical people

What about CEOs?

> She should understand every layer of the cake, and by the interview I can take that's not the case

I just read it, and I can't imagine how you can make such an inference from a brief, non-technical interview in a popular magazine.

Did Steve Jobs have any?

- mech engineering bachelors 2012

- 6 years of experience including stints as a PM at Tesla and some experience at Goldman and LeapMotion

- joined OpenAI in 2018, shortly became CTO and now CEO

While credentialism and gatekeeping is all too prominent in society today, for Mira I have serious doubts about her capacity as a leader. A serious lack of experience in all aspects

A little late to doubt her isn't it? Do you think she's just been sitting quietly in a corner for the last 5 years at OpenAI while it turned the entire tech industry upside down?

Why would anybody in her position ever take the job? How’s she going to smooth things over between that board and Nadella, considering he put in $10bn and they ousted both the chairman and CEO without telling him?

What alternative does MS have? OpenAI has the power in that deal.

Great technology can fail in the market due to a poorly run business. There is no shortage of companies looking to compete with OpenAI.

No argument to the first point. However on the 2nd, the competitors are far behind. We could speculate that competitive offerings will equal ChatGPT4 in (X time period), but for all we know that's also when ChatGPT5 comes out. Just because others are trying to compete doesn't mean they're competitive. Right now OpenAI dominates the market. So they have the power in the negotiations.

True. She's the only person in the executive team that didn't come into OpenAI with pre-existing clout. They appointed her CTO with only a few years of engineering experience and now CEO. She must be a phenomenon.

The show Silicon Valley directly satirizes this description of a person with Nelson Bighead.

She’s one of the people that ousted altman. I already like her. Remains to he seen if she’ll return open into openai.

I wonder why you would have doubts about someone you clearly don't know anything about? Before becoming a partner and then CEO of YC, Sam Altman was a founder of Loopt (failed startup). I was surprised at his sudden rise at YC but it seemed to work out. No reason why this shouldn't be the case here.

Why does everyone have to have a phd to be considered right for the job?

That being said 6 years experience is a bit sort for CTO especially if your college schooling wasn’t in the subject matter.

I guess it’s more like 11 years work experience. That’s more reasonable especially for a high achieving person

I worked with her at Leap Motion, and found her to be incredibly intelligent, charismatic, energetic, compassionate, and candid. I think she will dazzle.

Just the first two bullet points alone are pretty astounding. Entering the game with a solid but not exactly rare undergraduate degree in 2012 and straight up to PM on a major product line at Tesla just a few years later, is already quite an incredible turn of fortune.

I would not have expected anything less than a decade of solid industry experience combined with, at least a technically-weighted MBA or a masters in engineering in such a role.

Now where does this doubt come from?

This _person_ has worked and was rapidly promoted to leadership positions at two of the companies that have extremely outsized reputations for technical proficiency, during periods which both companies achieved dramatic successes...

but somehow, somehow, there are doubts about _her_?

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