Mira Murati, who served as chief technology officer at OpenAI until September last year, has officially launched her own AI company, Thinking Machines Lab, bringing in a team of ex-OpenAI executives to build AI that works alongside humans instead of replacing them.
John Schulman, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, has joined as chief scientist. Barret Zoph, OpenAI’s former vice president of research, is now the CTO of Thinking Machines Lab. Lilian Weng, who led safety efforts at OpenAI, has also made the jump. According to LinkedIn data, more than a dozen of the company’s nearly 30 employees previously worked at OpenAI.
Thinking Machines Lab, which has been quietly getting assembled since October, announced its existence in a blog post on Tuesday, saying it wants to develop AI models that “adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise.”
Mira wants $1 billion in funding
Silicon Valley has been speculating about Mira’s next move ever since she resigned as OpenAI’s CTO, and now the focus has moved to how much funding she can secure. Thinking Machines Lab is currently in talks with venture capital firms, and according to a Bloomberg report, Mira is looking to raise around $1 billion.
The company has not publicly disclosed its funding targets, and it remains unclear which investors are involved in the negotiations.
“While current systems excel at programming and mathematics, we’re building AI that can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise,” Thinking Machines Lab wrote in its first official statement. The startup claims its approach will be different from traditional AI labs.
Instead of working on fully autonomous AI, Thinking Machines Lab says it’s developing multimodal models that operate across text, audio, and video, allowing for deeper human-AI collaboration, which if you know Mira, that’s her whole thing.
Thinking Machines Lab’s focus on research and transparency
Thinking Machines Lab is still in its early days, with no products or public AI models available yet. But it plans to work on scientific and programming-focused AI systems, to unlock new discoveries in those fields. It’s also hiring aggressively in machine learning and research management, according to job postings.
Unlike some AI startups that operate behind closed doors, Thinking Machines Lab says it will regularly publish technical papers, blog posts, and open-source code. “We think sharing our work will not only benefit the public but also improve our own research culture,” the company said.
Mira’s track record is nothing short of outstanding for a woman who’s only 36. She joined OpenAI in 2018 and played a central role in developing ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex, and Sora. She became CTO in May 2022 and oversaw OpenAI’s research, product, and safety teams.
She is credited for OpenAI’s biggest breakthroughs, including advanced speech-to-speech technology and more steerable AI models. Mira also held OpenAI’s top leadership position, if only briefly.
When Sam Altman was ousted as OpenAI CEO in November 2023, she was named interim CEO—but only lasted three days before OpenAI’s board appointed Emmett Shear in her place. Five days later, Altman was reinstated, and Mira returned to her CTO role.
Mira’s departure was actually part of a trend at OpenAI back then. Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, left in mid-2024 to launch Safe Superintelligence Inc., a research lab focused on building a powerful AI system with safety at its core.
He is now raising over $1 billion at a valuation exceeding $30 billion, according to Bloomberg. Alongside Mira, OpenAI’s chief research officer Bob McGrew and VP of research Barret Zoph also resigned last year. Many of OpenAI’s top talents have since joined or launched their own AI ventures.
Mira’s career has been one of both innovation and controversy. As OpenAI’s CTO, she pushed the boundaries of AI research while maintaining a pragmatic stance on automation. When asked about AI displacing creative jobs, she once famously said, “Maybe [the jobs] shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” As you can imagine, that got her a lot of backlash online.
In September 2024, Mira was included in Time’s list of “The 100 Most Influential People in AI.” Earlier that year, she also received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Dartmouth College for her contributions to the field.
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