Former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI Mira Murati has announced Tuesday plans for her new artificial intelligence startup Thinking Machines Lab.
Thinking Machines Labs intends to build tools to make AI work simpler for “people’s unique needs and goals,” and create AI systems that are “more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable” than those currently available.
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While Murati is heading the startup as CEO, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman—who recently left another AI startup Anthropic, after working there for five months—is to be chief scientist. Barret Zoph, OpenAI’s ex-chief research officer, takes on the role of CTO at Thinking Machines Lab.
“The scientific community’s understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities. 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. And, despite their potential, these systems remain difficult for people to customize to their specific needs and values,” Thinking Machine Labs said in a blog post.
The company also noted that it has plans to build “multimodal” systems that “work with people collaboratively,” and can “adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum” of applications.
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Murati left OpenAI in 2024 after six years at the company. Murati came to OpenAI in 2018 as the vice president of applied AI and partnerships. After being promoted to the executive role of a CTO in 2022, she led the company’s work on ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E, and the code-generating system Codex, which powered early versions of GitHub’s co-pilot programming assistant. Murati was also briefly the interim CEO when Sam Altman was removed from the position by board members in 2024.
Before OpenAI, Murati was senior product manager at Tesla. Thinking Machines Lab’s blog lists 29 employees from OpenAI, Character AI, and Google DeepMind, among other top firms. The company is among a growing list of startups launched by former OpenAI executives, which include Safe Superintelligence and Anthropic.