OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati has announced new AI focused startup. The AI startup is called Thinking Machines Lab. The ex-OpenAI CTO’s new venture was launched on Tuesday, with a team of about 30 leading researchers and engineers hired from competitors including OpenAI, Meta and Mistral.
Mira Murati’s new company called Thinking Machine Labs, the startup, the latest entrant in the crowded AI space intends to build tooling to “make AI work for [people’s] unique needs and goals,” and to create AI systems that are “more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable” than those currently available.
Mira Murati poaching for AI startup
Thinking Machine Labs, the new company by Mira Murati has roughly two-thirds employees from OpenAI including Barret Zoph, a prominent researcher who left the ChatGPT maker on the same day as Murati in late September. Zoph will serve as the CTO. This also displays the ability of Mira Murati, a long-time executive at OpenAI, to poach top researchers from her previous employer.
Murati will be the CEO of Thinking Machine Labs. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the company’s chief scientist. As per sources, more OpenAI employees are expected to join Mira Murati’s AI startup.
For months, rumors have flown of Murati hiring high-profile AI researchers and staffers for an AI venture. Thinking Machine Labs is actively hiring machine learning scientists and engineers, as well as a research program manager, per the company’s blog post.
Thinking Machines Lab’s focus
A key focus of the AI startup is AI alignment, which is the process of encoding human values into AI models to make them safer and more reliable.
Thinking Machines Lab is also in talks with investors for raising capital.
Growing AI startups
Other than Murati two other former OpenAI executives have launched AI startups, Anthropic and Safe Superintelligence, and raised billions in funding.
Thinking Machines Lab said its approach differentiated from competitors because of its co-design by the research and product teams. It said it would contribute to research on AI alignment by sharing code, datasets, and model specifications.
“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.
Importance given to AI safety by Murati’s AI startup
Thinking Machine Labs will also focus on AI safety. The company is planning safety measures by preventing misuse of the models it releases, by sharing best practices and recipes for how to build safe AI systems with the industry. It will also support external research on alignment by sharing code, datasets, and model specifications.
“We’ll focus on understanding how our systems create genuine value in the real world,” Thinking Machine Labs wrote in its blog post. “The most important breakthroughs often come from rethinking our objectives, not just optimizing existing metrics.”
Thinking Machine Lab’s Mira Murati
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 as VP of applied AI and partnerships. Later being promoted to CTO in 2022.
Murati left OpenAI last October after six years at the company. At the time, she said she was stepping away to “do her own exploration.” Her abrupt resignation was one of a string of high-profile exits from the company as it underwent governance structure changes.
Prior to OpenAI, she worked at augmented reality startup Leap Motion and at Tesla.
