Mira Murati steps back into the spotlight, carefully

She also answered questions about the episode that first put her more squarely in the public eye: the chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO. (Inside OpenAI it came to be called “the blip.”) Murati said she felt clear about her decisions in each moment — that protecting the mission and the team was the through-line that made the choices feel obvious even as the situation appeared to be falling apart from the outside. She said the company would have “imploded” if not for her involvement through that strange five-day stretch and its immediate aftermath. But she acknowledged that clarity of intent is not the same thing as clarity about consequences. In retrospect, she said, she would have pushed harder for more information and an actual transition plan. What she did not say, at least not directly, is whether she thinks things turned out well.

Asked whether she still trusts her former boss, she sidestepped the question, steering the conversation toward a larger concern that she returned to several times: the concentration of consequential decisions in too few hands — not just at OpenAI but across the industry. Her worry, she said, is less about the character of any individual leader (though she acknowledged that matters) and more about the absence of structural checks. Good people make bad calls. Well-intentioned organizations drift. Too much attention has been paid to virtue and too little to governance, she suggested.

Chang also politely pressed her on the departures of several high-profile researchers from Thinking Machines in recent months , a subject Murati has largely avoided in public and that she downplayed on Thursday. First, she said, building a frontier AI lab from scratch compresses years of normal organizational volatility into months. She also acknowledged that compensation — the nine-figure packages that have become standard currency in the war for AI talent — captures people’s imaginations, but she suggested it isn’t usually the whole story. To some audience laughter, she said of her own competitive instincts, “When I wake up in the morning, I am not thinking about how to kill the competitor.”

Naturally, Chang asked about what comes next for AI broadly, including for the humans who AI companies once said would be empowered by AI but who’ve more recently grown scared by talk of mass job displacement, not to mention a future where AI is used to create chemical weapons.

Murati, who was born in Albania and speaks with a slight Eastern European accent, was measured in her response. She pushed back on the framing of inevitable dystopia or inevitable utopia, arguing that neither outcome is predetermined and that the period we’re in right now is the one that will determine which way things go. Still, she said, if humans take their hands off the wheel too soon, the future will look very different, and not better.

Correction: This story originally misstated the length of Murati’s tenure as CTO of OpenAI.