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.
