Mira Murati launches new AI venture

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has started a new AI research and product company, Thinking Machines Lab, with the focus on making  AI systems more “widely understood,” “customizable” and “generally capable.” 

Several former OpenAI employees, including co-founder John Schulman (as chief scientist) and former VP of Research Barret Zoph (as CTO), have joined Murati’s new venture, which she will lead as CEO. The company, which has listed names of 29 starting employees in an official blog post, is looking to hire more machine learning experts, product builders and research program managers. 

“I started Thinking Machines Lab alongside a remarkable team of scientists, engineers, and builders. Our goal is simple, advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science, and practical applications,” said Murati in a social media post Wednesday.

The company also published a blog post, which talks about the widening gap between AI capabilities and the scientific community’s understanding of frontier AI systems. It explains that the concentration of expertise to build and train AI systems with a small number of well-funded companies is responsible for this gap. 

While no details on the company’s work and first product were shared by Murati, the blog post states “we are building models at the frontier of capabilities in domains like science and programming.”

The company also emphasized its commitment to AI safety. “We plan to contribute to AI safety by maintaining a high safety bar to prevent misuse of our released models, share best practices and recipes for how to build safe AI systems with the industry, and accelerate external research on alignment by sharing code, datasets, and model specs.”

During her more than six year tenure with OpenAI, which ended last September, Murati held several key positions including SVP of Research, Product & Partnerships and CTO for nearly three years. She was briefly appointed as interim CEO after the ouster of Sam Altman from OpenAI in late 2023. 

Murati and Zoph announced their departure from OpenAI last September. “I am stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” Murati said in a social media post at that time.

Schulman after leaving OpenAI last August spent six months at rival AI company Anthropic.

According to a March 2024 report in NYT, Murati played a key role in Altman’s removal as OpenAI CEO. Murati and several other members of the leadership team including co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever had concerns about Altman’s leadership. 

Murati reportedly documented these concerns in a memo to Altman and also shared them with the OpenAI board of directors, which fired Altman for not being “consistently candid in his communications” with them. 

Sutskever left OpenAI in May 2024 to start a new company Safe SuperIntelligence and has raised $1 billion in funding. 

Image credit: Microsoft