“I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” Murati wrote in a post on X on Wednesday, adding that she will work to ensure a smooth transition.

Murati had been a central figure at the artificial intelligence start-up, serving as its interim CEO after OpenAI’s chief executive officer Sam Altman was briefly ousted last November.

In a response to her post, Altman thanked Murati, writing: “It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally.” He also said that he would share more with employees about transition plans soon.

During her time at the company, Murati played a key role in shepherding major product releases, including OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot, its DALL-E image generation software, and its recently released advanced voice mode that lets users talk to ChatGPT in essentially real time.

Her departure marks the latest executive exit at the company since Altman’s ouster. Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist, left in May. In August, co-founder Greg Brockman said he would go on leave until the end of the year and researcher John Schulman left for AI rival Anthropic. The departures leave only two members of OpenAI’s original founding team at the company: Altman and Wojciech Zaremba.

In her post on X, the text of which she earlier sent to employees at the company, Murati said she was grateful to have worked with the OpenAI team.

“Together we’ve pushed the boundaries of scientific understanding in our quest to improve human well-being,” she wrote.