Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, has unveiled her new startup, which, as expected, is focused on artificial intelligence.
The startup, called Thinking Machines Lab, emerged from stealth mode today with the goal of developing tools that enable AI to cater to individuals’ unique needs and objectives, as well as creating more advanced, customizable, and widely understood AI systems.
Murati will serve as the CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, with John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI, as the company’s chief scientist, and Barret Zoph, former chief research officer at OpenAI, as the CTO.
In a blog post shared with TechCrunch, Thinking Machines Lab noted that despite significant advancements in AI capabilities, significant gaps remain, including a lack of understanding of cutting-edge AI systems and limited access to the knowledge required to train these systems.
The blog post states, “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. Furthermore, these systems remain difficult for people to customize to their specific needs and values.”
Thinking Machines Lab aims to develop “multimodal” systems that collaborate with people and can adapt to the full range of human expertise, enabling a broader spectrum of applications, according to the blog post.
The company stated, “[W]e are building models at the frontier of capabilities in domains like science and programming. Ultimately, the most advanced models will unlock the most transformative applications and benefits, such as enabling novel scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs.”
Another key aspect of Thinking Machines Lab’s work will be AI safety, with the company planning to contribute to safety by preventing the misuse of its models, sharing best practices for building safe AI systems, and supporting external research on alignment by sharing code, datasets, and model specifications.
The company wrote in its blog post, “We’ll focus on understanding how our systems create genuine value in the real world. The most important breakthroughs often come from rethinking our objectives, not just optimizing existing metrics.”
I started Thinking Machines Lab alongside a remarkable team of scientists, engineers, and builders. 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…— Mira Murati (@miramurati) February 18, 2025
Murati departed OpenAI last October after a six-year tenure, stating at the time that she was leaving to “do her own exploration.”
Murati initially joined OpenAI in 2018 as VP of applied AI and partnerships and later became CTO in 2022, leading the company’s work on ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Codex, which powered early versions of GitHub’s Copilot programming assistant.
Murati briefly served as OpenAI’s interim CEO after Sam Altman’s abrupt departure and has been described by Altman as a close ally.
Rumors have circulated for months about Murati hiring high-profile AI researchers and staffers for an AI venture. The Thinking Machines Lab blog lists 29 employees from prominent companies like OpenAI, Character AI, and Google DeepMind.
Thinking Machines Lab is currently hiring machine learning scientists and engineers, as well as a research program manager, according to the company’s blog post.
There were previous reports of Murati being in talks to raise over $100 million from unnamed VC firms, but the blog post did not confirm or deny this.
Before joining OpenAI, Murati spent three years at Tesla as a senior product manager of the Model X, where she worked on early versions of Autopilot, Tesla’s AI-enabled driver-assistance software. She also served as VP of product and engineering at Leap Motion, a startup developing hand- and finger-tracking motion sensors for PCs.
Murati joins a growing list of former OpenAI executives who have launched their own startups, including Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and Anthropic.
