Few women monopolize as much power as she does in the offices of big technology, a territory with overrepresentation of men. Mira Murati (Vlorë, Albania, 34 years old) has been one of the key pieces of the earthquake called OpenAI, the company that just a year ago no one knew about and today sets the pace in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry. As the company's chief technology officer, Murati has overseen the team that developed the popular chatbot ChatGPT, the most successful app in history, and the Dall-E imager. Her name was the first to be considered when three weeks ago the board of directors fired the CEO, Sam Altman, who returned to her position with a bang five days later.
This service record and her position as an executive at OpenAI, one of the companies of the moment, has earned her being chosen as the most influential woman in the world in 2023 in the ranking of Financial Times, which places the Spanish soccer player Jenni Hermoso in second position. The singer Beyoncé, the actress Margot Robbie, the president of General Motors, Mary Barra, and the president of the European Commission, Ursula vor den Leyen, complete the top positions on the list.
Murati is part of the quartet of OpenAI founders. In that group are, in addition to her and Altman, Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist until he fell into disgrace for supporting Altman's dismissal, and Greg Brockman, president of the company. Murati remained faithful to her friend when he was fired: despite being elected as interim CEO, she signed the letter signed by 95% of the workforce that demanded Altman's reinstatement in the company, threatening otherwise to accept the offer of Microsoft to hire them all.
The executive of Albanian origin graduated in Mechanical Engineering from Dartmouth College, the American university where the discipline of AI was born. Before coming to OpenAI she was an analyst at Goldman Sachs, an engineer at the French aerospace company Zodiac Aerospace, a product manager at Tesla, where she oversaw the Model X, and a vice president of product at Leap Motion, a virtual reality company. In 2018 she made the leap to OpenAI because her knowledge of the state of the art of AI made her think that general AI, that which reaches or exceeds the capabilities of the human being, was close to becoming a reality. She wanted to be part of its development, she said In an interview published by Wiredand considered that the best place for it was the company led by Altman.
In addition to directing the team of developers, at OpenAI he has had a key function for ChatGPT: checking that the chatbot is not biased and deceives people, something that seems better resolved in the second version of the tool.
Murati is the only woman with stripes at OpenAI, a company that, judging by its recent changes in organizational structure, does not seem subscribed to feminism. One of the new advisors is former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who in 2005 said that innate differences between the sexes explain why there are fewer women with successful careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers. English).
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