Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Launches AI Startup Thinking Machines Lab

This Founder Left OpenAI to Launch a Competitor. It Aims to Bring AI to the Masses

Murati was one of OpenAI's most visible executives, often appearing as a high-profile representative of the company in presentations and in media appearances. She even briefly became OpenAI's CEO in 2023 during founder Sam Altman's temporary exile from the company. Since her September 2024 departure, Murati has been hiring AI experts from top firms, including OpenAI, to join her in building a new company, now revealed to be called Thinking Machines. Murati will be the CEO. In a post on Thinking Machines' official website, the company describes itself as "an artificial intelligence research and product company... building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals." According to the post, Thinking Machines will endeavor not just to make advanced AI models, but to enhance peoples' understanding of how AI works and how they can customize AI for their own needs. To achieve these goals, Thinking Machines says it will operate as an open-source entity, stating that it plans to "frequently publish technical blog posts, papers, and code" so that other developers of AI models can integrate Thinking Machines' learning and innovations into their own products. The company added that "sharing our work will not only benefit the public, but also improve our own research culture."

Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati launches AI start-up

Nearly 20 former OpenAI employees have joined Murati's Thinking Machines Lab. Mira Murati quit OpenAI as its chief technology officer last September, in a move that seemingly even surprised Sam Altman. Now, less than half a year later, she has announced the launch of her own AI start-up, Thinking Machines Lab. Thinking Machines will foster a culture of "open science" by frequently publishing technical blog posts, papers, and code, the start-up said in a blog on its website. "We think sharing our work will not only benefit the public, but also improve our own research culture." The start-up's aim seems to bridge the gap between the scientific development of frontier AI systems and its practical applications. The company wrote: "While AI capabilities have advanced dramatically, key gaps remain. The scientific community's understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities." "To bridge the gaps, we're building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customisable and generally capable." Moreover, Thinking Machines Lab said it will "contribute to AI safety" by "maintaining a high safety bar", sharing best practices and "recipes" to build safe AI systems, and share code, datasets, and model specs. However, the company hasn't disclosed details on its funding plans or a timeline on the launch of its first product. Although, nearly a month after Murati quit OpenAI, Reuters reported that she would be raising more than $100m for her new AI start-up, although, Thinking Machines has not confirmed that. Murati is taking the helm as Thinking Machines' CEO, alongside 28 other AI experts, including Barret Zoph - a former OpenAI VP of research - who will be the start-up's new CTO and OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as its chief scientist. Schulman, who was the co-lead of ChatGPT, quit OpenAI in August last year to join rival AI company Anthropic - a start-up also created by former OpenAI employees. However, a few weeks ago, he quit Anthropic. A total of 18 former OpenAI employees have joined Murati on her venture, alongside former scientists from Meta, HuggingFace and Google's DeepMind. Moreover, in the blog, Thinking Machines announced that it is hiring product builders, machine learning experts and a research program manager. For a brief period during Sam Altman's ousting from OpenAI in 2023, Murati headed the ChatGPT-maker as its interim CEO. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Former OpenAI CTO Murati Unveils Plans for New AI Startup

Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer at OpenAI, has joined forces with several executives who worked at the ChatGPT maker to launch a new artificial intelligence startup. The company, called Thinking Machines Lab, will focus on building artificial intelligence models and products that support more "human-AI collaboration" across every field of work, according to a blog post released Tuesday. "While current systems excel at programming and mathematics, we're building AI that can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum of applications," the company said. Other key executives on Murati's team include John Schulman, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and will be chief scientist at Thinking Machines Lab, and Barret Zoph, who served as OpenAI's vice president of research and will be the new startup's CTO. Lilian Weng, OpenAI's former vice president of safety, has also joined the startup. Out of the nearly 30 current staff members listed in the blog post, more than a dozen were previously at OpenAI, according to those employees' public LinkedIn profiles. Guessing at what Murati's company will do and how much money it will raise has become a Silicon Valley parlor game since she stepped down from OpenAI in September. Murati has been in talks with venture capital firms about a funding round, according to people familiar with the matter. And in recent months, she was said to be seeking about $1 billion, one of the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. The company declined to discuss funding plans. While Thinking Machines Lab does not have a product or model out yet, it claims to have a different philosophy than some other AI companies. The startup is having researchers and product leaders "co-design" in tandem to "make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable," according to the blog post. "Instead of focusing solely on making fully autonomous AI systems, we are excited to build multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively," the startup said, referring to AI models that can work across mediums such as text, audio or video. The company is building models designed to excel in domains like science and programming, with an aim to unlock new breakthrough discoveries in those areas. Thinking Machines Lab is continuing to hire talent in areas such as machine learning and research management, per job listings online. Murati's startup also plans to frequently publish technical blog posts, papers and code. "We think sharing our work will not only benefit the public, but also improve our own research culture," the company said. An Albanian-born, Dartmouth-educated engineer, Murati, joined OpenAI in 2018 and was appointed CTO in 2022. During her time there, she shepherded major product releases, including the popular ChatGPT chatbot and advanced voice mode, a feature that lets users talk to the product in essentially real time. She also managed OpenAI's technical staff.

Thinking Machines Lab is ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's new startup | TechCrunch

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has announced her new startup. Unsurprisingly, it's focused on AI. Called Thinking Machines Lab, the startup, which came out of stealth today, intends to build tooling to "make AI work for [people's] unique needs and goals," and to create AI systems that are "more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable" than those currently available. Murati is heading up Thinking Machines Lab as CEO. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the company's chief scientist, and Barret Zoph, OpenAI's ex-chief research officer, is CTO. In a blog post shared with TechCrunch, Thinking Machines Lab wrote that while AI capabilities have advanced dramatically, "key gaps" remain. "The scientific community's understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities," read the blog post. "Knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and people's abilities to use AI effectively. And, despite their potential, these systems remain difficult for people to customize to their specific needs and values." Thinking Machines Lab plans to focus on building "multimodal" systems that "work with people collaboratively," according to the blog post, and that can "adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum" of applications. "[W]e are building models at the frontier of capabilities in domains like science and programming," read the blog post. "Ultimately, the most advanced models will unlock the most transformative applications and benefits, such as enabling novel scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs." AI safety will be another core tenet of Thinking Machines Lab's work. The company said that it plans to contribute to safety by preventing misuse of the models it releases, sharing best practices and recipes for how to build safe AI systems with the industry, and supporting external research on alignment by sharing code, datasets, and model specifications. "We'll focus on understanding how our systems create genuine value in the real world," Thinking Machines Lab wrote in its blog post. "The most important breakthroughs often come from rethinking our objectives, not just optimizing existing metrics." Murati left OpenAI last October after six years at the company. At the time, she said she was stepping away to "do her own exploration." Murati came to OpenAI in 2018 as VP of applied AI and partnerships. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, she led the company's work on ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E, and the code-generating system Codex, which powered early versions of GitHub's Copilot programming assistant. Mirati was briefly OpenAI's interim CEO after CEO Sam Altman's abrupt firing. Altman has described her as a close ally. For months, rumors have flown of Murati hiring high-profile AI researchers and staffers for an AI venture. Thinking Machines Lab's blog lists 29 employees from OpenAI, Character AI, and Google DeepMind, among other top firms. Thinking Machines Lab is actively hiring machine learning scientists and engineers, as well as a research program manager, per the company's post. At one point, Murati was said to be in talks to raise over $100 million from unnamed VC firms. The blog didn't confirm or deny this. Prior to OpenAI, Murati spent three years at Tesla as a senior product manager of the Model X, the automaker's crossover SUV, during which Tesla released early versions of Autopilot, its AI-enabled driver-assistance software. She also was VP of product and engineering at Leap Motion, a startup building hand- and finger-tracking motion sensors for PCs. Murati joins a growing list of former OpenAI execs launching startups, including rivals such as Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence and Anthropic.

Former OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati launches rival start-up

Mira Murati, OpenAI's former chief technology officer, has launched a rival artificial intelligence start-up focused on making the technology widely accessible. Murati, 36, on Tuesday unveiled Thinking Machines Lab, a product and research organisation, which aims to make "AI systems more widely understood, customisable and generally capable". A blog post on its website said "knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and people's abilities to use AI effectively". The San-Francisco based company has also poached senior former OpenAI employees, including co-founder John Schulman, Jonathan Lachman, former head of special projects, and Barret Zoph, former vice-president. Murati, who temporarily served as chief executive of OpenAI during the failed coup against founder Sam Altman, has also hired researchers and engineers with experience at other competitors such as Google, Meta, Mistral and Character AI who will build models focused on science and programming. "Scientific progress is a collective effort," Thinking Machines Lab said. "We believe that we'll most effectively advance humanity's understanding of AI by collaborating with the wider community of researchers and builders." It added that it planned to publish technical blog posts, papers and code because it believed "sharing our work will not only benefit the public but also improve our own research culture". Murati had worked at OpenAI for more than six years, leading the company's efforts to build ChatGPT as a standalone product and working on technical breakthroughs from the company's large language models. In November 2023, OpenAI's directors appointed Murati as interim chief executive after removing Altman under claims he was not "sufficiently candid" with the board. Altman returned days later after protests from employees and investors. Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI cofounder and chief scientist who was also involved in the coup attempt, has since left the company to launch a start-up called Safe Superintelligence. It raised $1bn in September to focus on developing safe AI systems that have human level or superior intelligence.

Mira Murati is launching her OpenAI rival: Thinking Machines Lab

In a press release shared with The Verge, the company suggests that it's building products that help humans work with AI, rather than fully autonomous systems. "We're building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals," says the press release. Murati has been working to create an AI dream team for this new startup. She recently recruited OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as head of research. Barrett Zoph, another former OpenAI leader, is her startup's CTO. Sources tell The Verge that Schulman has been actively helping build the team by taking meetings with researchers mere blocks from OpenAI's headquarters. Jonathan Lachman, who led OpenAI's special projects division, has also jumped ship to join Murati's venture. In total, she has poached about 10 top researchers and engineers from elite AI labs, including OpenAI, Character.AI, and Google DeepMind.

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Launches AI Startup

The company has been in talks to raise venture capital funding Former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati launched an AI startup called Thinking Machines Lab on Tuesday, with a team of about 30 leading researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Meta and Mistral. The latest entrant into the crowded AI startup space wants to build artificial intelligence systems that encode human values and aim at a broader number of applications than rivals, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday. It shows the ability of Murati, a longtime executive at OpenAI, to poach top researchers from her previous employer. Roughly two-thirds of the company comprises former OpenAI employees -- including Barret Zoph, a prominent researcher who left the ChatGPT maker on the same day as Murati in late September. Zoph will serve as the startup's technology chief. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the startup's chief scientist. Schulman left OpenAI for rival Anthropic in August, saying that he wanted to "focus on AI alignment". AI alignment refers to a process of encoding human values into AI models to make them safer and more reliable -- a key focus for Murati's startup. More OpenAI employees are expected to join the company, sources told Reuters, who requested anonymity to discuss private matters. The company has been in talks to raise venture capital funding from investors, Reuters previously reported. Murati - who will be Thinking Machines Lab CEO - is among a growing list of former OpenAI executives who have launched AI startups. Another two, Anthropic and Safe Superintelligence, have both attracted former OpenAI researchers and raised billions in funding. Thinking Machines Lab said its approach differentiated from competitors because of its co-design by the research and product teams. It said it would contribute to research on AI alignment by sharing code, datasets, and model specifications. "While current systems excel at programming and mathematics, we're building AI that can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum of applications," the startup said. Murati joined OpenAI in June 2018, leading the development of ChatGPT and frequently appearing alongside CEO Sam Altman as the firm's public face. Her abrupt resignation was one of a string of high-profile exits from the company as it underwent governance structure changes. Prior to OpenAI, she worked at augmented reality startup Leap Motion and at Tesla.

Thinking Machine Labs is ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's new startup | TechCrunch

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has announced her new startup. Unsurprisingly, it's focused on AI. Called Thinking Machine Labs, the startup, which came out of stealth today, intends to build tooling to "make AI work for [people's] unique needs and goals," and to create AI systems that are "more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable" than those currently available. Murati is heading up Thinking Machine Labs as CEO. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the company's chief scientist, and Barret Zoph, OpenAI's ex-chief research officer, is CTO. In a blog post shared with TechCrunch, Thinking Machine Labs wrote that while AI capabilities have advanced dramatically, "key gaps" remain. "The scientific community's understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities," read the blog post. "Knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and people's abilities to use AI effectively. And, despite their potential, these systems remain difficult for people to customize to their specific needs and values." Thinking Machine Labs plans to focus on building "multimodal" systems that "work with people collaboratively," according to the blog post, and that can "adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum" of applications. "[W]e are building models at the frontier of capabilities in domains like science and programming," read the blog post. "Ultimately, the most advanced models will unlock the most transformative applications and benefits, such as enabling novel scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs." AI safety will be another core tenet of Thinking Machine Labs' work. The company said that it plans to contribute to safety by preventing misuse of the models it releases, sharing best practices and recipes for how to build safe AI systems with the industry, and supporting external research on alignment by sharing code, datasets, and model specifications. "We'll focus on understanding how our systems create genuine value in the real world," Thinking Machine Labs wrote in the blog post. "The most important breakthroughs often come from rethinking our objectives, not just optimizing existing metrics." Murati left OpenAI last October after six years at the company. At the time, she said she was stepping away to "do her own exploration." Murati came to OpenAI in 2018 as VP of applied AI and partnerships. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, she led the company's work on ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E, and the code-generating system Codex, which powered early versions of GitHub's Copilot programming assistant. Mirati was briefly OpenAI's interim CEO after CEO Sam Altman's abrupt firing. Altman has described her as a close ally. For months, rumors have flown of Murati hiring high-profile AI researchers and staffers. Per a recent Wired piece, Murati has poached roughly 10 employees so far from rivals such as OpenAI, Character AI, and Google DeepMind. Thinking Machine Labs' blog lists 29 employees, including Mirati. The company is hiring machine learning scientists and engineers and a research program manager. At one point, Murati was said to be in talks to raise over $100 million from unnamed VC firms. Prior to OpenAI, Murati spent three years at Tesla as a senior product manager of the Model X, the automaker's crossover SUV, during which Tesla released early versions of Autopilot, its AI-enabled driver-assistance software. She also was VP of product and engineering at Leap Motion, a startup building hand- and finger-tracking motion sensors for PCs. Murati joins a growing list of former OpenAI execs launching startups, including rivals such as Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence and Anthropic.

OpenAI Mafia Strikes Again with Mira Murati's New Venture

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has taken a bold step forward in the world of AI with the launch of Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence research and product startup. The lab aims to create a future where AI is fully accessible, allowing everyone to access powerful tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals. "Our goal is simple: advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science, and practical applications," Murati, who is serving as the chief operating officer of the startup, said on X. The lab's core leadership team also includes chief scientist John Schulman and chief technology officer Barret Zoph - both of whom are former OpenAI employees. Headquartered in San Francisco, the startup is focused on building multimodal models for text and images, with an actual focus on human collaboration. As per reports, the startup was in talks to raise $100 million in funding last year. The company believes that "scientific progress is a collective effort", and with this philosophy in mind, it has committed to sharing its research and code with the larger research community. Thinking Machines Labs plans to frequently publish technical blog posts, papers, and code Murati revealed that the company is trying to develop strong foundations to build more capable AI systems and foster a culture of open science that will help the whole field understand and improve these systems. "While current systems excel at programming and mathematics, we're building AI that can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum of applications," the company further stated. Although the blog does not directly mention AGI (artificial general intelligence) or ASI (artificial superintelligence), it emphasises the importance of developing strong foundations for building more capable AI systems. Notably, the push towards open source is interesting. Since DeepSeek's launch, more frontier labs and startups, including OpenAI, are adopting open source. Murati's startup is hiring for roles in engineering, research, and machine learning. However, unlike traditional hiring, the startup values strong personal and independent projects and welcomes both self-taught and formally trained applicants. "Our team combines rigorous engineering with creative exploration, and we're looking for collaborators to help shape this vision," the startup stated in a post. This reflects a growing trend where tech startups increasingly value personal insights and side projects in hiring, acknowledging them as strong indicators of skills and creativity. In a way, albeit smaller, Thinking Machines Lab mirrors OpenAI's early days - a tight-knit, elite team pushing AI forward. Nearly half of the company's 30 listed staff members previously worked at OpenAI alongside others from Mistral, Meta, and DeepMind. "Very strong team, a large fraction of whom were directly involved with and built the ChatGPT miracle," Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI, wrote on X while congratulating Murati on her new startup. Murati left OpenAI last October after six years at the company. "I'm stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration," she said at the time of leaving. Even Schulman, who joined Anthropic last year, left the company in just five months to join Murati's team. OpenAI alumni have already seeded multiple AI companies, and Thinking Machines Lab is part of this trend. Moreover, Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist at OpenAI, also announced his resignation and launched a new AI startup called Safe SuperIntelligence Inc (SSI), which raised $1 billion in funding, led by Nat Friedman and SSI co-founder Daniel Gross, within a span of three months. Jan Leike, a former OpenAI executive, joined Anthropic following his resignation. Perplexity AI, founded by former OpenAI researcher Aravind Srinivas, emerged after his 2018 stint at the company. Elon Musk, who left OpenAI the same year, also launched xAI in 2023. Notably, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of models, is led by former OpenAI employees Dario and Daniela Amodei. Other spinouts include Aidence (generative modelling), Cresta (AI for customer service), Cleanlab (ML dataset fixes), and Symbiote AI (3D avatars). OpenAI is becoming a launchpad for future AI founders, driving an explosion of AI entrepreneurship, much like how PayPal's old team shaped Silicon Valley giants.

Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati unveils Thinking Machines: A startup focused on multimodality, human-AI collaboration

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Ever since Mira Murati departed OpenAI last fall, many have wondered about the former CTO's next move. Well, now we know (or, at least have a rough idea). Murati took to X today to announce her new venture Thinking Machines Lab, an AI research and product company with a goal to "advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science and practical applications." Murati posted: "We're building three things: Helping people adapt AI systems to work for their specific needs; Developing strong foundations to build more capable AI systems; Fostering a culture of open science that helps the whole field understand and improve these systems." Thinking Machine's team of roughly two dozen engineers and scientists is stacked with other OpenAI alums -- including co-founder and deep reinforcement learning pioneer John Schulman and ChatGPT co-creator Barret Zoph -- which could position the startup to make significant strides in AI research and development. As of the posting of this article, the company's newly-launched X account @thinkymachines had already amassed roughly 14,000 followers. Model intelligence, multimodality, strong infrastructure Thinking Machines -- not to be mistaken with the now defunct supercomputer and AI firm of the 1980s -- isn't yet offering specific examples of intended projects, but suggests a broad focus on multimodal capabilities, human-AI collaboration (as opposed to purely agentic systems) and strong infrastructure. The goal is to build more "flexible, adaptable and personalized AI systems," the company writes on its new website. Multimodality is "critical" to the future of AI, Thinking Machines says, as it allows for more natural and efficient communication that captures intent and supports deeper integration. "Instead of focusing solely on making fully autonomous AI systems, we are excited to build multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively," the company writes. Going forward, the startup will build models "at the frontier of capabilities" in areas including science and programming. Model intelligence will be key, as will infrastructure quality. "We aim to build things correctly for the long haul, to maximize both productivity and security, rather than taking shortcuts," Thinking Machines writes. Calling scientific progress a "collective effort," the company says it will collaborate with the AI community and publish technical blog posts, papers and code. It will also take an "empirical and iterative" approach to AI safety, and pledges to maintain a "high safety bar" to prevent misuse, perform red-teaming and post-deployment monitoring and share best practices, datasets, code and model specs. Expanding on a decorated team Thinking Machines boasts an impressive team of scientists, engineers and builders behind top AI models including ChatGPT, Character AI and Mistral, as well as popular open-source projects PyTorch, the OpenAI Gym Python library, the Fairseq sequence modeling toolkit and Meta AI's Segment Anything. The startup is looking to expand on that base; it is currently on the lookout for a research program manager, as well as product builders and machine learning (ML) experts. The goal is to put together a "small, high-caliber team" of both PhD holders and the self-taught, the company writes. Those interested should apply here. Another OpenAI competitor? Murati abruptly resigned from OpenAI in September 2024 -- following the unexpected departure of other execs including Schulman and co-founder former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever -- after joining the company in 2018 and ascending to CTO in 2022 (the year that brought us the groundbreaking ChatGPT). At the time, she teased on X: "I'm stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration." Her next move had been a topic of speculation given her reputation as a steady operational force during OpenAI's tumultuous period in late 2023, when the board's attempted ousting of CEO Sam Altman briefly upended the company. Internally, she was seen as a pragmatic leader who kept OpenAI stable through uncertainty. Her decision to strike out on her own follows a broader shift in the AI research landscape -- where the breakneck race to train ever-larger models is giving way to an era of applied AI, agentic systems and real-world execution. Her Thinking Machines announcement comes amid a flurry of new model capabilities and benchmark shattering. OpenAI continues to make innovative breakthroughs -- including its new o3-powered Deep Research mode, which scrolls the web and curates extensive reports -- but it also faces strong competition in all directions. Just today, for instance, xAI released Grok 3, which rivals GPT-4o's performance. With OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever launching Safe Superintelligence and other industry veterans charting their own paths, the question now is where Thinking Machines will place its bets in this evolving landscape.

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Launches AI Research And Product Startup

The team includes scientists and engineers who have helped create AI products such as ChatGPT and Character.ai Nearly five months after stepping down as OpenAI's chief technology officer (CTO), Mira Murati has launched her own AI venture, 'Thinking Machines Lab'. Announcing the launch on X, Murati said, "Our goal is simple, advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science and practical applications." The AI research and product startup aims to plug the existing gaps in AI and make these systems more widely understandable, customisable and generally capable. "While AI capabilities have advanced dramatically, key gaps remain. The scientific community's understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities. Knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and people's abilities to use AI effectively. And, despite their potential, these systems remain difficult for people to customize to their specific needs and values," the company said in a blog post. Thinking Machines Lab will build personalised AI systems with advanced multimodal capabilities instead of focusing on making fully autonomous AI systems. The AI startup further said it plans to frequently publish technical blog posts, papers, and code, with an emphasis on human-AI collaboration across industries. Thinking Machines Lab's team includes scientists, engineers and builders who have helped create AI products such as ChatGPT and Character.ai, open-weight models like Mistral and popular open source projects such as PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq and Segment Anything.

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati launches Thinking Machines Lab - SiliconANGLE

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati launches Thinking Machines Lab Former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati today launched a new artificial intelligence startup, Thinking Machines Lab Inc., that will develop multimodal models. The company is entering the crowded AI market four months after Reuters reported that Murati (pictured) was in talks to raise more than $100 million for a new venture. Thinking Machines Lab didn't address the funding rumors in a launch blog post today. However, the company did confirm another previously reported detail: that its initial team includes former OpenAI research executive Barret Zoph. Murati and Zoph left OpenAI last September shortly after John Schulman, one of the ChatGPT developer's co-founders, stepped down as well. Murati is Thinking Machines Lab's Chief Executive Officer while Zoph is its CTO. Schulman, in turn, is the startup's Chief Research Officer. Thinking Machines Lab plans to train multimodal models that can process not only text but also multimedia files such as images. As OpenAI's CTO, Murati oversaw the development of ChatGPT and DALL-E, a series of image generation models. She also played a key role in forging OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft Corp., which has provided much of the cloud infrastructure that powers the AI developer's research. Thinking Machines Lab will approach "infrastructure quality as a top priority," the company detailed in its launch blog post. "Research productivity is paramount and heavily depends on the reliability, efficiency, and ease of use of infrastructure. We aim to build things correctly for the long haul." The company also shared other details about its development roadmap. Thinking Machines Lab's models won't be specifically tailored to programming and math tasks like OpenAI's o1. Instead, they will feature the ability to "adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum of applications," the company stated. It's unclear whether those applications might include consumer use cases. Customizability will be another focus of Thinking Machines Lab's engineering efforts. The company plans to make it simple for customers to customize its AI models to their requirements. Today, companies customize neural networks using prompts and by fine-tuning them on proprietary training datasets. Last year, it was reported that Thinking Machines Lab's products will be based on proprietary models. However, it appears that the company plans to open-source at least some components of its AI stack. "We believe that we'll most effectively advance humanity's understanding of AI by collaborating with the wider community of researchers and builders," the company stated on its website. "We plan to frequently publish technical blog posts, papers, and code." Thinking Machine Labs' open-source program will encompass, among others, AI safety. It plans to publicly release code and other technical assets produced as part of its efforts to avoid harmful AI output. The company intends to test its algorithms' safety using established methods such as red-teaming, or the practice using simulated cyberattacks to find weak points. Thinking Machines Lab currently has 29 employees. Besides former OpenAI staffers, the initial team includes researchers from Google LLC, Meta Platforms Inc., Mistral and other major players in the AI ecosystem.

Mira Murati Is Ready to Tell the World What She's Working On

The former OpenAI CTO has launched Thinking Machines Lab to make AI more accessible. Last September Mira Murati unexpectedly left her job as chief technology officer of OpenAI, saying, "I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration." The rumor in Silicon Valley was that she was stepping down to start her own company. Today she announced that indeed she is the CEO of a new public benefit corporation, called Thinking Machines Lab. Its mission is to develop top-notch AI with an eye towards making it useful and accessible. Murati believes there's a serious gap between rapidly advancing AI and the public's understanding of the technology. Even sophisticated scientists don't have a firm grasp on AI's capabilities and limitations. Thinking Machines Lab plans to fill that gap by building in accessibility from the start. It also promises to share its work by publishing technical notes, papers and actual code. Underpinning this strategy is Murati's belief that we are still in the early stages of AI, and the competition is far from closed. Though it occurred after Murati began planning her lab, the emergence of DeepSeek -- which claimed to build advanced reasoning models for a fraction of the usual cost -- vindicates her thinking that newcomers can compete with more efficient models. Thinking Machines Lab will, however, compete on the high end of large language models. "Ultimately the most advanced models will unlock the most transformative applications and benefits, such as enabling novel scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs," the company writes in a blog post on Tuesday. Though the term "AGI" isn't used, Thinking Machines Lab believes that upscaling the capabilities of its models to the highest level is important to filling the gap it's identified. Building those models, even with the efficiencies of the DeepSeek era, will be costly. Though Thinking Machines Lab hasn't shared its funding partners yet, it's confident that it will raise the necessary millions. Murati's pitch has attracted an impressive team of researchers and scientists, many of whom have OpenAI on their resumes. Those include former VP of research Barret Zoph (who is now CTO at Thinking Machines Lab), multimodal research head Alexander Kirillov, head of special projects John Lachman, and top researcher Luke Metz, who left Open AI several months earlier. The lab's chief scientist will be John Schulman, a key ChatGPT inventor who left OpenAI for Anthropic only last summer. Others come from competitors like Google and Mistral AI. The team moved into an office in San Francisco late last year and has already started work on a number of projects. Though it's not clear what its products will look like, Thinking Machines Lab indicates that they won't be copycats of ChatGPT or Claude, but AI models that optimize collaboration between humans and AI -- which Murati sees as the current bottleneck in the field. American inventor Danny Hillis dreamed of this partnership between people and machines over 30 years ago. A protege of AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, Hillis built a super computer with powerful chips running in parallel -- a forerunner to the clusters that run AI today. He called it Thinking Machines. Ahead of its time, Thinking Machines declared bankruptcy in 1994. Now a variation of its name, and perhaps its legacy, belongs to Murati.

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Announces Launch of Thinking Machines Lab | PYMNTS.com

The new company will help people adapt artificial intelligence (AI) systems to meet their specific needs, develop foundations to build more capable AI systems, and foster a culture of open science aimed at helping the whole field understand and improve AI systems, Murati said in a Tuesday post on X. "Our goal is simple, advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science and practical applications," Murati said. The Thinking Machines Lab website described the company as an AI research and product company focused on making AI systems more widely understood, customizable and capable. Its current team includes members who have created widely used AI products, open-weights models and open source projects, according to the site. The company aims to focus on human-AI collaboration and AI systems that are more flexible, adaptable and personalized, per the site. "We see enormous potential for AI to help in every field of work," the site said. "While current systems excel at programming and mathematics, we're building AI that can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum of applications." Murati said in September that she was leaving OpenAI after 6½ years to explore other things. "I'm stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration," she wrote in a Sept. 25 post on X. "For now, my primary focus is doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we've built." Murati served as interim CEO of OpenAI for a time in November 2023 when OpenAI Co-Founder and CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted from the company by its board. When announcing her appointment as interim CEO, the company said: "[Murati] brings a unique skill set, understanding of the company's values, operations and business, and already leads the company's research, product and safety functions."

Former OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati's AI startup taps top researchers from competitors

(Reuters) - Thinking Machines Lab, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, has tapped about 30 leading researchers and engineers from competitors such as OpenAI, Meta and Mistral, it said in a blog post on Tuesday. The startup said it would also focus on making artificial intelligence systems and products more collaborative with humans. Murati is raising funds from venture capitalists for her new AI startup, Reuters had reported in October. Her abrupt resignation in late September had marked another high-profile exit from the ChatGPT maker as the company undergoes major governance structure changes. Murati, who briefly served as OpenAI's interim CEO in 2023 when Sam Altman was ousted by the non-profit board, joins a growing list of former OpenAI executives launching startups, including rivals such as Anthropic and Safe Superintelligence. (Reporting by Krystal Hu in New York and Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)

Mira Murati's Startup Thinking Machines Recruits 19 Former Colleagues, Including Ex-OpenAI Co-Founder John Schulman

Thinking Machines recruits include OpenAI co-founder John Schulman and three former OpenAI vice presidents. Five months after leaving her role as OpenAI's CTO, Mira Murati has founded Thinking Machines Lab. As its first order of business, the new startup has recruited several former OpenAI employees, including co-founder John Schulman and ex-Vice Presidents Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng, and Nikki Sommer. Schulman, who left OpenAI last year to join Anthropic, takes on the role of chief scientist. Meanwhile, Zoph serves as the startup's CTO. What Will Murati's Startup Do? Between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI to name a few, plenty of AI labs are competing to build the smartest, fastest and cheapest models. Murati's startup, on the other hand, has a clear focus on "human-AI collaboration" and "more flexible, adaptable, and personalized AI systems." From the outset, Thinking Machines has been careful to position itself outside the crowded frontier model development space. "Our goal is simple," Murati said in a post on X, "advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science, and practical applications." A Return to Openness The launch post discussing the launch of Thinking Machines points to a strong intellectual leaning toward open software development and knowledge sharing. "Scientific progress is a collective effort," the site states, adding that the new startup plans to "frequently publish" technical blog posts, papers, and code. Notably, Thinking Machines' commitment to openness contrasts OpenAI's stance regarding open sourcing. Although it was founded upon open source principles, OpenAI projects that were once in the public domain like Gym, Baselines, or Spinning Up, haven't been updated for years. Newer systems, including the technology behind ChatGPT, remain strictly proprietary. AI Safety For the most part, departing OpenAI employees have been careful not to criticize the company's shift away from open-source AI. However, some ex-staff members have voiced concerns about its approach to safety. Miles Brundage, who left OpenAI in October, pointed to "gaps" in AGI readiness that he said couldn't be addressed while working for the company. Schulman's tenure at Anthropic also saw his research on AI alignment take on more of a focus on safety than the performance breakthroughs he was known for at OpenAI. Outlining the startup's AI safety plans, the Thinking Machines post highlighted "proactive research" and "real-world testing." Meanwhile, Schulman's influence can be seen in the lab's commitment to "accelerating external research on alignment by sharing code, datasets, and model specs."

After leaving OpenAI, Mira Murati debuts her AI startup Thinking Machines Lab

The team -- roughly two-thirds of which comprises former OpenAI employees -- includes Barret Zoph, a prominent researcher who left the ChatGPT maker on the same day as Murati in late September. Zoph will serve as the startup's technology chief. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the startup's chief scientist. Schulman left OpenAI for rival Anthropic in August, citing wanting to "focus on AI alignment". AI alignment refers to a process of encoding human values into AI models to make them safer and more reliable -- a key focus for Murati's startup.

Mira Murati's new startup is called Thinking Machines Lab

Former OpenAI exec Mira Murati Tuesday unveiled her new startup's name, Thinking Machines Lab, and goal: developing AI systems focused on the interaction between humans and AI. Why it matters: Other startups founded by former OpenAI executives -- from more mature AI firms like Anthropic to other just-out-of-the-gate startups like Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence -- have more single-mindedly dedicated themselves to creating AI that's more powerful than humans.