OpenAI's chief research officer Bob McGrew and VP research (post-training) Barret Zoph are departing.

The news comes just hours after CTO Mira Murati said that she would leave the company after more than six years at the ChatGPT developer.

“Leadership changes are a natural part of companies, especially companies that grow so quickly and are so demanding," CEO Sam Altman said.

"I obviously won’t pretend it’s natural for this one to be so abrupt, but we are not a normal company, and I think the reasons Mira explained to me (there is never a good time, anything not abrupt would have leaked, and she wanted to do this while OpenAI was in an upswing) make sense."

He claimed that the three departures were made “independently of each other and amicably.” All three posted comments in favor of OpenAI.

The news comes just as Reuters reported the company plans to transition to a for-profit corporation where Altman, who currently has no stake in OpenAI, could get as much as seven percent of the business. It is currently trying to raise money at a $150 billion valuation, so his stake could be worth around $10.5bn.

Last year, Altman was fired by the board over claims he lied to the board, but returned and most of the board was let go.

Since then, co-founder Ilya Sutskever left to start his own company, co-founder John Schulman left to join Anthropic, former safety leader Jan Leike departed, and co-founder and president Greg Brockman took a sabbatical - among others.