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Mira Murati, chief technology officer of OpenAI, during an interview on “The Circuit with Emily Chang” in San Francisco on April 4, 2023.

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OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said Wednesday that she is leaving the company after six and a half years.

“After much reflection, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she wrote in a memo to the company, which she also published on social media site X, adding, “There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right.”

Murati is the latest high-level executive to depart the startup. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and former safety leader Jan Leike announced their departures in May. Co-founder John Schulman said last month that he was leaving to join rival Anthropic.

Murati also wrote that she is “stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration. For now, my primary focus is doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we’ve built.”

Shortly after Murati announced her departure, Reuters said OpenAI is planning to restructure to a for-profit business that no longer reports to a non-profit board. The company will retain its non-profit segment, according to Reuters.

OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT and SearchGPT, is currently pursuing a funding round that would value the company at more than $150 billion, according to sources familiar with the situation who asked to not be named because details of the round have not been made public. Thrive Capital is leading the round and plans to invest $1 billion, and Tiger Global is planning to join as well. Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple are reportedly also in talks to invest.

While OpenAI has been in hyper-growth mode since late 2022, when it launched ChatGPT, it has been simultaneously riddled with controversy and high-level employee departures, with some current and former employees concerned that the company is growing too quickly to operate safely.

Murati raised eyebrows in June, when she told an audience at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference that new artificial intelligence tools will likely lead to the disappearance of some creative jobs.

“Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place if the content that comes out of it is not very high quality,” Murati said in an on-stage interview, adding, “I really believe that using it as a tool for education [and] creativity will expand our intelligence and creativity and imagination.”

Murati became a well-known name when OpenAI’s board abruptly ousted CEO Sam Altman last November and Murati was named interim CEO.

OpenAI’s board said in a statement at the time that Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications with the board.” The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reported that Sutskever trained his focus on ensuring that AI would not harm humans, while others, including Altman, were instead more eager to push ahead with delivering new technology.

Almost all of OpenAI’s employees had signed an open letter saying they would leave in response to the board’s action. Days later, Altman was back at the company and Murati moved back to her former role as CTO. Board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley were out. Sutskever was removed from the board but remained an employee at the time.

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Amazon to close all of its Fresh grocery stores in UK

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Amazon to close all of its Fresh grocery stores in UK

People walk past an Amazon Fresh store in Washington, DC, on August 26, 2021.

Nicholas Kamm | AFP | Getty Images

Amazon plans to close all of its Fresh supermarkets in the U.K., in the latest recalibration of its grocery strategy.

The company said in a Tuesday blog that it’s preparing to close all 19 of its Fresh U.K. stores, “following a thorough evaluation of business operations and the very substantial growth opportunities in online delivery.” Five of the Fresh locations are expected to be converted into Whole Foods stores, Amazon said.

Amazon opened its first Fresh location outside the U.S. in London in 2021, about a year after it debuted the store concept in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. Fresh stores offer cheaper prices and more mass-market items compared to Whole Foods, the upscale supermarket chain Amazon acquired for $13.7 billion in 2017. Many of the stores also feature Amazon’s cashierless “Just Walk Out” technology.

The Fresh store pullback in the U.K. comes as Amazon has continued to adjust its grocery ambitions. The company has slowed expansion of its Fresh grocery chain and Go cashierless stores in the U.S. It still maintains 500 Whole Foods locations and has opened mini “daily shop” Whole Foods stores in New York City.

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At the same time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and other company executives have touted the success of sales of “everyday essentials” within its online grocery business, which refers to items like canned goods, paper towels, dish soap and snacks.

Jassy told investors at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May that he remains “bullish” on grocery, calling it a “significant business” for Amazon.

The company on Tuesday also said that it plans to offer same-day delivery of groceries, including perishable items, in the U.K. beginning next year.

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Chinese EV giant BYD says it has a backup plan if it’s cut off from Nvidia chips

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Chinese EV giant BYD says it has a backup plan if it's cut off from Nvidia chips

The Chinese electric car manufacturer BYD presents its models at the Open Space Area during the IAA Mobility in Munich, Bavaria, Germany, on September 12, 2025.

Eyeswideopen | Getty Images News | Getty Images

BYD has a backup plan if it gets cut off from the Nvidia chips it currently uses in its cars, a top executive at the Chinese electric carmaker told CNBC on Tuesday.

Stella Li, executive vice president at BYD, said the company had not received any directive from the Chinese government to stop using Nvidia chips — but if it did, it has a plan B.

“Everybody has a backup. BYD has [a] backup,” Li told CNBC’s Dan Murphy.

Li declined to expand on what the plan is, but she pointed to the Covid-19 pandemic during which there was a global shortage of semiconductors which badly affected the auto sector. BYD had “no issue” at the time because it developed a lot of its technology in-house, he said, so it was able to source alternatives quickly.

BYD's EVP Stella Li says the EV Maker is committed to Nvidia

Indeed, BYD has sought to have control over large parts of its supply chain, from manufacturing its own cars to developing its own batteries.

“We have a lot of strong … even deeper technology in-house, so we always have backup,” Li said.

Nvidia, whose chips underpin much of the world’s artificial intelligence development, has been caught in the crossfire amid U.S.-China tensions. The company’s H20 AI chip — designed specifically to comply with U.S. export restrictions to China — was first banned, then permitted to be sold in China this year after a revenue-share deal between Washington and Nvidia.

Now, China has reportedly been discouraging local tech firms from buying Nvidia’s AI chips.

Nvidia designs an entirely different set of semiconductors for cars, however.

One of Nvidia’s systems, Nvidia Drive AGX Orin, is designed to enable cars to carry out some driving tasks autonomously. BYD is a customer of this product.

There is no indication so far that the Chinese government is looking to ban this Nvidia system.

Li said BYD had not been told to stop using any Nvidia products, adding it was unlikely that Beijing would ban the U.S. firm’s auto chips.

“I don’t think any country will do that, because this automatic will kill Nvidia,” Li said. “So Nvidia now is the highest market value company, so if they lose the big market from China … nobody wants to see this.”

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Amazon faces off against FTC over ‘deceptive’ Prime program

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Amazon faces off against FTC over 'deceptive' Prime program

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Amazon and the Federal Trade Commission are squaring off in a long-awaited trial over whether the company duped users into paying for Prime memberships.

The lawsuit, filed by the FTC in June 2023 under the Biden administration, alleges that Amazon deceived tens of millions of customers into signing up for its Prime subscription program and sabotaged their attempts to cancel it. Amazon has denied any wrongdoing.

The trial is being held in a federal court in Seattle, Amazon’s backyard. Jury selection began Monday and opening arguments are slated for Tuesday, with the trial expected to last about a month.

Launched in 2005, Amazon’s Prime program has grown to become one of the most popular subscription services in the world, with more than 200 million members globally, and it has generated billions of dollars for the company. Membership costs $139 a year and includes perks like free shipping and access to streaming content. Data has shown that Prime members spend more and shop more often than non-Prime members.

Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos famously said the company wanted Prime “to be such a good value, you’d be irresponsible not to be a member.”

Regulators argue that Amazon broke competition and consumer protection laws by tricking customers into subscribing to Prime. They pointed to examples like a button on its site that instructed users to complete their transaction and did not clearly state they were also agreeing to join Prime for a recurring subscription.

“Millions of consumers accidentally enrolled in Prime without knowledge or consent, but Amazon refused to fix this known problem, described internally by employees as an ‘unspoken cancer’ because clarity adjustments would lead to a drop in subscribers,” the agency wrote in a court filing last week.

The FTC says that the cancellation process is equally confusing, requiring users to navigate four webpages and choose from 15 options — a “labyrinthian mechanism” that the company referred to internally as “Iliad,” referencing Homer’s epic poem about the Trojan War.

Amazon has argued that the Prime sign up and cancellation processes are “clear and simple,” adding that the company has “always been transparent about Prime’s terms.”

“Occasional customer frustrations and mistakes are inevitable — especially for a program as popular as Amazon Prime,” the company wrote in a recent court filing. “Evidence that a small percentage of customers misunderstood Prime enrollment or cancellation does not prove that Amazon violated the law.”

A crackdown on ‘dark patterns’

The FTC notched an early win in the case last week when U.S. District Court Judge John Chun ruled Amazon and two senior executives violated the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act by gathering Prime members’ billing information before disclosing the terms of the service.

Chun also said that the two senior Amazon executives would be individually liable if a jury sides with the FTC due to the level of oversight they maintained over the Prime enrollment and cancellation process.

Amazon’s Prime boss Jamil Ghani and Neil Lindsay, a senior vice president in its health division who previously oversaw Prime’s technology and business operations, are named defendants in the complaint.

Russell Grandinetti, Amazon senior vice president of international consumer, is also named in the suit, but Chun argued he had “less involvement in the operation of the Prime organization” compared to Ghani and Lindsay.

Chun also scolded attorneys for Amazon in July for withholding thousands of documents from the FTC and abusing a legal privilege to shield them from scrutiny. Among the documents was a 2020 email where Amazon’s retail chief Doug Herrington said “subscription driving” was a “shady” practice and referred to Bezos as the company’s “chief dark arts officer.”

Representatives from Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Amazon also faces a separate lawsuit brought by the FTC in 2023 accusing it of wielding an illegal monopoly. That case is set to go to trial in February 2027.

The Prime case is part of the FTC’s broader crackdown on so-called “dark patterns,” which it began examining in 2022. The phrase refers to deceptive design tactics meant to steer users toward buying products or services or giving up their privacy.

The agency brought a similar dark patterns lawsuit against Uber in April, accusing the ride-hailing and delivery company of deceptive billing and cancellation practices tied to its Uber One subscription service. Uber has disputed the FTC’s allegations.

Earlier this year, it reached settlements with online dating service Match and online education firm Chegg over claims that their subscription practices were deceptive or hard to cancel.

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