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Mira Murati, who was once at the helm as Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, has embarked on a new venture with the introduction of her AI start-up designed to democratize access to cutting-edge technology.
At 36, Murati announced the birth of Thinking Machines Lab on Tuesday. This organization, dedicated to both research and product development, has set its sights on demystifying AI systems, making them customizable, and enhancing their overall capabilities.
According to a post on the company’s website, “The deep understanding of training these systems is largely restricted to leading research labs. This bottleneck restricts public discussions around AI and limits individuals’ ability to harness its full potential.”
Based in San Francisco, the start-up has managed to attract a host of former OpenAI heavyweights. Joining the team are John Schulman, co-founder, Jonathan Lachman, who previously led special projects, and Barret Zoph, the former vice-president.
After a brief stint as the temporary CEO of OpenAI during an internal leadership shuffle involving Sam Altman, Murati has also brought on board a talented team of researchers and engineers. These individuals come with diverse experience from tech giants like Google, Meta, Mistral, and Character AI, and are set to design models emphasizing science and programming.
“Scientific advancement thrives through collective efforts,” remarked Thinking Machines Lab. “We aim to push the frontiers of human understanding in AI by leveraging collaboration with a broad spectrum of researchers and innovators.”
Furthermore, the company is committed to open communication and said it plans to release technical blog posts, academic papers, and the underlying code. Their goal is that “by sharing our work, not only will the public benefit, but it will also enrich our research environment.”
Murati, over her more than six-year tenure at OpenAI, played a pivotal role in turning ChatGPT into a standalone product while also spearheading significant technical advances in large language models.
In November 2023, Murati was appointed interim CEO by OpenAI’s directors following Altman’s ousting over transparency issues with the board. Altman, however, returned shortly after due to an uproar from both employees and backers.
Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and the chief scientist at OpenAI who had also been part of this leadership challenge, has since left. He’s launched a new venture named Safe Superintelligence, which secured $1 billion in funding this September, focused on crafting safe AI systems with human-equivalent or superior cognition.
