Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, has launched a new startup called Thinking Machines Lab. Sources familiar with the matter said the startup is aiming to raise $1 billion at a roughly $9 billion valuation. This valuation is unusually high for a startup less than a year old.
However, investors have been eager to back companies founded by former OpenAI employees. Murati spent years at OpenAI, where she worked on the development of ChatGPT and other AI research initiatives. She briefly served as CEO in November 2023 after OpenAI’s board dismissed Sam Altman, a move that sparked turmoil within the company.
After Altman’s reinstatement as CEO, Murati resumed her role as CTO before eventually leaving OpenAI.
Murati’s new AI venture
Murati positioned Thinking Machines Lab as an artificial intelligence research and product lab focused on making AI more accessible.
“To bridge the gaps, we’re building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable,” Murati stated. Murati has recruited a long list of engineers and AI researchers from her former employer OpenAI, as well as from Meta and Anthropic. Several of Murati’s former coworkers, including John Schulman, who co-led the creation of ChatGPT; Jonathan Lachman, formerly the head of special projects at OpenAI; Barret Zoph, a cocreator of ChatGPT; and Alexander Kirillov, who worked closely with Murati on ChatGPT’s voice mode, are also working at Thinking Machines Lab.
Murati is one of a handful of former OpenAI executives who have gone on to launch their own companies. Ilya Sutskever, the former OpenAI chief scientist and cofounder, left the company in May 2024. Dario and Daniela Amodei, who also worked at OpenAI, founded Anthropic in 2021.
Photo by; Jason Strull on Unsplash
