“The creature peers with many eyes into the open world…” Who might this creature be?
The upheaval at OpenAI over the past week has outdone Game of Thrones for plot twists—and even Bulgarian politics. Sam Altman, the leader of the company that has become a dominant force, was suddenly… fired. In his place stood the company's chief technology officer, Mira Murati. Then came utter chaos, at the end of which everything fell right back into place.
We have yet to learn (or perhaps we never will) how and why this circus happened.
More than curious is the version, reported even by serious media outlets, that the cause of it all is Q*—“Q star,” a new algorithm capable of shaking humanity to its core. Altman presented it to the board of directors, and they were so frightened that they decided to save the world…
And while the online debates turned into telenovela-style squabbles over who pulls the strings and how, who ended up in the stronger position and what changes in the tech world after all the commotion… only the image of the woman who, for a few days, found herself at the head of the company was left on the sidelines.
Although her name came up after the huge success of ChatGPT, the Albanian Mira Murati always remained in Altman's shadow. Now the time has come to learn more about her, because, by all appearances, the future of the world will depend on her actions—and not only the world of technology…
The Albanian Heating Coil
Yes, forgive the cliché—“Albanian heating coil” is a worn-out Bulgarian catchphrase, and there was no way I could resist opening with it.
When the company's board declared of Altman that it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” all sorts of interpretations began. According to one of them, the atmosphere at the AI giant resembles that of today's China—the business people clash with the technology people, who believe the former don't understand the subject well enough. That they are forced to make decisions beyond their abilities, because those decisions are too important. Could this also be connected to the news that the company's main goal had officially been declared as “creating general AI”?
There is logic in that, too—no one could fault Altman on business metrics. He turned a little-known firm, supposedly created to make artificial intelligence accessible to everyone, into a vast empire into which Microsoft alone has poured more than $13 billion.
At first it seemed there was also a “gray cardinal,” the company's “brain,” Ilya Sutskever. Undeniably a fascinating figure, and yet it was decided that not he but Murati would stand at the head of OpenAI—she had worked close to Altman and had never distanced herself from him. What's more, a day after the scandal broke, Sutskever apologized for Altman's dismissal, and after Altman's return it quietly turned out that Sutskever was no longer on the board.
The chaos was total also because the decision thus came to rest on the shoulders of the other three board members, whose names are considerably less familiar. Adam D'Angelo is an entrepreneur best known as the creator of the Quora platform and a former vice president of Facebook; Tasha McCauley is known mostly for her work in robotics; and Helen Toner is… known for nothing at all—she heads a research center on security in technology.
Enver Hoxha
Throughout the whole scandal, our heroine “logged on” only once. At the height of it, she wrote that “OpenAI is nothing without its people.” And at the end, with a heart emoji, she shared the tweet about Sam Altman’s return.
Everything Wikipedia has on her comes to… 14 lines. When I asked ChatGPT itself to draw me Mira Murati seizing power, it apologized and said it couldn’t, since it can only create images of public figures.
But how is it possible that the chief technology officer of a company that has drawn so many eyes has still never ended up in the spotlight?
It is only fair, of course, to mention that until recently the same was true of Altman himself. The great furor over ChatGPT quickly changed that, but not where Murati is concerned, despite her exceptionally important role. In companies like this, the position of chief technology officer carries enormous responsibility for all of the company’s products. For all the big questions tied to the progress of artificial intelligence.
Give Mira a Chance
“Artificial intelligence can be misused, or used by bad actors. So then there are big questions about how you govern the use of this technology globally, in a way that is consistent with human values.” Those are Mira Murati’s words to Time magazine—one of the few interviews she has ever given, which you could count on the fingers of one hand.
“It’s important for OpenAI and companies like ours to bring this into the public consciousness in a way that’s controlled and responsible. But we’re a small group of people, and we need a ton more input into this system, a lot more input that goes beyond the technologies—definitely regulators and governments and everyone else,” she adds.
I would definitely invite her to help promote Digital Stories—after all, that is exactly why this site exists: to gather so many different points of view on technology, a subject vital to our civilization.
But isn’t the big question about the next generation peeking through here somewhere—about the thing that is apparently emerging under the name Q*, as cryptic as that of one of Musk’s children? Perhaps it is no coincidence that the news on the subject also mentions that the big dispute over the new algorithm began with a memo sent by none other than Mira Murati to all OpenAI employees.
Let There Be Mira
Her past is so secretive that, according to some sources, she was born and raised in Tirana, studied computer science there and later moved to the United States. According to others, only her parents are Albanian, while she was born and raised in San Francisco… According to Wikipedia, her birthplace is Vlorë in Albania, and the source cited is… the Indian edition of Forbes. Even her year of birth comes in different versions, putting her today anywhere between 34 and 38. Almost like Kim Jong Un…
Still, she was most likely born on December 16, 1988, which means she will soon turn 35.
After a good deal of digging, I came across a podcast in which she talks about her past—that she is the daughter of a literature teacher. “When I was a kid, Albania was extremely isolated, like North Korea is today. There wasn’t much choice of entertainment, nothing but books. Books were the whole universe… I just looked for everything in books.”
Even the official OpenAI website not only has no biography of her—her name appears only in the long lists of employees who built this or that platform.
Or could it be that she herself… is an algorithm?
Take Mira—or Take the Axe!
Not yet. In her own words, she left for Canada when she was 16. We know she finished high school in Vancouver and then studied both art and engineering at Dartmouth College. Though the smallest member of the Ivy League, the college is famous as the place where, more than half a century ago, the world's first computer scientists gathered and began talking about “artificial intelligence.”
Yet nothing in the biography of Miss Murati (there are at least enough sources to confirm she is not a Mrs.) suggests a professional pull toward algorithms in particular. Her first job was as an analyst at the investment bank Goldman Sachs. Then she was a product manager on Tesla's notorious Model X. For a while she was at the startup Leap Motion.
She left in 2016 and spent two years without a job… until she was hired as deputy head of the applied AI department at OpenAI. She climbed the hierarchy quickly, until we reach May 2022, when she took her current position as chief technology officer, directly responsible for developing the ChatGPT project.
A Three Days' Wonder
With, of course, the brief interlude between November 17 and 20 of this year, when she shot to the head of the entire company and then stepped back.
But… isn't chief technology officer usually a role for someone with serious technical experience, who knows the subject inside out and has worked professionally on development in the field? It looks somewhat odd against both the education and the track record of our heroine.
Of course, no one can deny her enormous contribution to turning ChatGPT into a super-sensation. But it is also especially telling how, once again, the flagship role in the tech world has gone to a company that is… strange, to put it mildly, where decisions are made hastily and impulsively, as in that astonishing last week.
Microsoft's leader Satya Nadella says of her that she has “demonstrated an ability to assemble teams with technical expertise, commercial acumen, and a deep appreciation for the importance of the mission.”
When Q* Was Young
Paranoid Android. “Please, could you stop the noise? I’m trying to get some rest from all the unborn chicken voices. Voices in my head,” sing the rockers from Radiohead, and the song of the same name, Mira says, describes her best. Paranoid Android, how does that sound to you? Or the lyrics, as confused as this and as the whole situation at OpenAI lately.
By the way, the song is dedicated to a “real” paranoid android, that lovable fellow Marvin from Douglas Adams's great The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That is definitely not an image we would want artificial general intelligence to grow into…
The Quiet White Danube Stirs
There aren't many other breaches in the wall guarding her personal information. We know that she speaks English, Italian and Albanian. Her hobbies are reading fiction, playing the piano, making chocolate desserts and dancing salsa. She also has a soft spot for mountain hiking. When does she find the time?!
Her favorite film is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Quite curious, if you remember that Stanley Kubrick's science fiction classic, based on the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, is about a future in which humanity faces its first encounter with an unknown civilization.
“The film continues to stir my imagination with its imagery and music, especially in the breathtaking sequence where the space shuttle lands to the accompaniment of Johann Strauss's waltz ‘The Blue Danube,’ inviting contemplation of the weightlessness of the event and the magnificence of the moment,” she explains. And I'm sure she wrote out her answers for that interview; it wasn't done live.
Her favorite book is rather unconventional—the Duino Elegies, poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. Lofty, classical poetry that is definitely not for everyone.
Reconciliation
“My curiosity started with mathematics,” Mira says. “When I was a child, I was solving problems all the time, competing in olympiads, and I loved it. It was such a passion.”
“One of the things people get wrong about communist regimes is that when everyone is equal, there is fierce competition for knowledge, and education is everything. That's the environment I grew up in. I have always been very hungry for knowledge and have always strived for it.”
In the beginning, after the ChatGPT boom, many people reproached its creators for releasing to the mass consumer a project that had not been studied thoroughly enough. For opening Pandora's box, for popularizing a technology that other big companies also had but had not dared to show the world.
And here we are, a whole year later. That decision has proved more than successful, and the apocalypse (at least for now, before Q*, whoever that may be) is still not here—though there is plenty of tongue-wagging about which professions will disappear. What does Mira think about all this?
“We didn't expect quite so much excitement when our child came into the world. In fact, we were even a little anxious about releasing it. I'm curious to see the areas where it will start generating benefits for people, and not just headlines and pure curiosity,” she tells Time once again.
Mira and Milko
Wait… “our child,” really?!
If the headline of this piece struck you as far-fetched, it turns out our heroine herself sees things this way. Here the defenders of traditional values will have something to say about the family status of Altman and Murati as potential parents—it won't be me.
“We chose the chatbot format because dialogue is a way to interact with the model and give it feedback,” Mira explains. “If we think its answer is wrong, we can say, ‘Are you sure? I think actually…’ And then it has the chance to carry on, much the way we would talk to another person.”
And a year later? It's no secret that the technology is advancing thanks to all those conversations. And OpenAI has something none of its competitors can afford—the accumulated data from the chatbot's “conversations” with billions of users. Data that, in the battle of the algorithms, is definitely worth its weight in gold nuggets.
The Mirages Are Near, the Road Is Long
Mira describes her work at Tesla as “a very formative experience—I went through the whole process, from designing a vehicle to deploying it.” But, she says, what interested her more was general intelligence. “I wasn't sure how far we would get, but I knew that even if we just got very close, the things we would build along the way would be incredible. Given that, OpenAI's mission to develop artificial intelligence tools for the benefit of humanity really appealed to me.”
And one more curious thing. While all of us rushed to wonder whether programmers or writers would be the first to lose their jobs because of “her child,” Mira, much like Bill Gates, believes the most important changes ahead are in education.
“We can see that it has the potential to revolutionize the way we learn. There are, say, 30 people in a classroom. Each one has a different background, a different way of learning, and they all get the same curriculum. With tools like ChatGPT, you can talk to the model endlessly to understand a concept in a way that's tailored to your level of understanding. This has enormous potential to help us with personalized education.”
Q Superstar
But, as we said, the problem is keeping it out of the hands of “bad people.” And talking more about the real questions that technology raises.
“Our goal is to get to artificial general intelligence. And we want to get there in a way that ensures it goes well for humanity. That we are building something that is ultimately beneficial,” says the compatriot of Skanderbeg, Albania's national hero.
“With all its eyes the creature-world beholds the open,” writes Rainer Maria Rilke in Mira's favorite book, the one mentioned earlier. Might that creature turn out to be Q*?
In our confused world, more surely depends on today's heroine than on most of the world's political leaders. Will she cope? We're counting on that solid Eastern European education.
One thing is certain: we live in interesting times…
