Mira Murati

It’s been a tumultuous 12 months for Mira Murati, one of the driving forces behind OpenAI’s meteoric rise. As the company’s chief technology officer, Murati worked behind the scenes to guide models like ChatGPT and DALL-E to mainstream adoption. But last November she was thrust into the spotlight when she was appointed interim CEO following the controversial—and brief—ouster of Sam Altman. According to a New York Times report, Murati had shared her concerns about Altman’s leadership with the board. But after a widespread pushback from employees and investors, Altman was reinstated to the top post, with Murati’s full support. (Murati wrote in a statement in March that her comments to the board about Altman were “all feedback Sam already knew,” adding “I fought their actions aggressively and we all worked together to bring Sam back.”)

In the months since, Murati has played a larger public role at the company. In May, she introduced the company’s new flagship model, GPT-4o, which impressed users with its sophisticated real-time voice interactions. She showcased the company’s progress on SearchGPT, a search engine, and Sora, a text-to-video model. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual Met Gala, she spoke about OpenAI’s chatbot installation at the museum.

But Murati has also had some high-profile stumbles: When she was asked whether the training data for OpenAI’s video generation model Sora came from copyrighted sources like YouTube, she answered evasively. She provoked another firestorm in June when she claimed that AI would replace some creative jobs that she said perhaps “shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” 

These comments have contributed to a rocky year in the public perception of OpenAI. Meanwhile, Murati and her team are forging ahead with their next generation text model, which Murati predicts will possess the intelligence of a PhD student for some specific tasks—and could arrive in a year.

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*Disclosure: OpenAI and TIME have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access TIME's archives.