Who is Mira Murati, one of the most influential women in the world in 2023?

Few women wield as much power as she does in the offices of the major technology companies, a territory with an over-representation of men. Mira Murati (Vlorë, Albania, 34 years old) has been one of the key players in the earthquake called OpenAI, the company that just a year ago nobody 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 has developed the well-known conversational robot ChatGPT, the most successful application in history, and the Dall-E image generator. Her name was the first to be considered to replace CEO Sam Altman when the company’s board of directors ousted him three weeks ago (he was reinstated five days later).

This track record and her position as an executive at OpenAI — one of the most important companies of the moment — has landed her in the Financial Times list of the most influential women of the year. The list also includes Spanish soccer player Jenni Hermoso, singer Beyoncé, actress Margot Robbie, General Motors CEO Mary Barra and European Commission President Ursula vor den Leyen.

Murati was one of the four people that founded OpenAI. In addition to her and Altman, the group includes Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist, who fell from grace for supporting Altman’s dismissal, and Greg Brockman, president of the company. Murati remained loyal to her friend when he was fired: despite being elected as interim CEO, she joined the letter signed by 95% of the company staff demanding Altman’s reinstatement as head of OpenAI, threatening otherwise to accept Microsoft’s offer to hire them all.

The Albanian-born executive holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Dartmouth College, the U.S. university where the AI discipline was born. Before coming to OpenAI, she was an analyst at Goldman Sachs, an engineer at French aerospace company Zodiac Aerospace, a product manager at Tesla, where she oversaw the Model X, and 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 in AI made her think that general AI, the kind that reaches or exceeds human capabilities, was close to becoming a reality. She wanted to be part of its development, she said in an interview published by Wired, and she felt the best place for it was OpenAI.

In addition to leading the team of developers, Murati also played a key role in the development of ChatGPT: checking that the chatbot is not biased and misleading people, something that seems to be better solved in the second version of the tool.

Murati is the only high-ranking woman at OpenAI, a company that, judging by its recent changes in organizational structure, does not seem to be a fan of feminism. One of the new advisors is former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who in 2005 said that innate gender differences explain why there are fewer women with successful careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

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