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Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO, announces new startup with focus on AI alignment

Murati’s new AI company called Thinking Machines Lab comes six months after her abrupt exit from OpenAI.

Born in Albania and educated in Canada, Mira Murati is a mechanical engineer by training who built a hybrid race car as an undergraduate student at Dartmouth College. (Photo: X/@miramurati)

Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, has founded a new AI startup called Thinking Machines Lab. In a blog post on Tuesday, February 18, the newly launched AI research and product startup said that its objective is to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable.”

“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,” Thinking Machines Lab said.

Thinking Machines Lab is looking to develop AI systems that are encoded with human values in order to make them safer and more reliable, as per the blog post.

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The company revealed that it is taking a unique approach to developing AI systems, involving co-design by the research and product teams at Thinking Machines Lab.

I started Thinking Machines Lab alongside a remarkable team of scientists, engineers, and builders. We’re building three things:
– Helping people adapt AI systems to work for their specific needs
– Developing strong foundations to build more capable AI systems
– Fostering a…

— Mira Murati (@miramurati) February 18, 2025

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

“While current systems excel at programming and mathematics, we’re building AI that can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum of applications,” the startup said.

The Thinking Machines Lab team

Currently, Thinking Machines Lab has employed around 30 AI researchers and engineers with about two-thirds of them having worked at OpenAI in the past. The other employees are former Meta, Google DeepMind, CharacterAI, and Mistral employees, according to a report by Reuters.

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Barret Zoph, the CTO of Thinking Machines Lab, is a prominent ex-OpenAI researcher who left the startup behind ChatGPT on the same day as Murati. John Schulman, the chief scientist at Thinking Machines Lab, is a co-founder of OpenAI.

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Other prominent members of the team include Jonathan Lachman, former OpenAI head of special projects and Lilian Weng, former OpenAI vice president. Luke Metz, Sam Shleifer, and Stephen Roller are former OpenAI research scientists.

Who is Mira Murati?

Murati initially worked at augmented reality startup Leap Motion as well as Elon Musk-owned Tesla.

In June 2018, she joined OpenAI to lead the development of ChatGPT and frequently appeared alongside CEO Sam Altman. In September 2024, Murati resigned from her position, saying she wanted to “create the time and space to do my own exploration.”

Her abrupt exit from the AI startup was one of a string of high-profile exits from the company as it underwent governance structure changes.

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Also Read | OpenAI co-founder Sutskever’s SSI in talks to be valued at $20 bln

Ilya Sutskever, former OpenAI chief scientist, also launched his own startup called Safe Superintelligence last year and is reportedly in talks to raise funding at a valuation of at least $20 billion.