Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Launches Rival AI Startup
Delhi February 19: Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Artificial Intelligence (AI) giant OpenAI is launching her own startup called Thinking Machines Lab to rival the ChatGPT-maker.
Murati had left OpenAI abruptly in September last year. Her statement read, “I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.”
Building a Strong Team
Thinking Machines Lab announced on its official X handle on Wednesday, February 19, 2025, that it was hiring candidates to join its team. The team consists of “scientists, engineers, and builders behind some of the most widely used AI products and libraries, including ChatGPT, Character.ai, PyTorch, and Mistral” and is “committed to open science through publications and code releases, while focusing on human-AI collaboration that serves diverse domains.”
Advancing AI
Murati expressed her vision for Thinking Machines Lab, stating that the goal is to advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science, and practical applications. The company plans to build multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively and can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise, enabling a broader spectrum of applications.
Future Plans
While the specifics of what Thinking Machines Lab plans to release remain unclear, the company mentioned that it would frequently publish technical blog posts, papers, and code on its official website.
Notable individuals working at Thinking Machines Lab include OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as the Chief Scientist, CTO Barrett Zoph, the co-creator of ChatGPT, and former VP of Research (post-training) at OpenAI. Alexander Kirillov, another prominent member, used to be the co-creator of Advanced Voice Mode at OpenAI and Segment Anything Model (SAM) at Meta AI. The team also includes professionals from renowned organizations like Google Deepmind, Character.ai, Mistral, and more.
