Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is launching her own rival AI startup Thinking Machines Lab

Mira Murati's startup Thinking Machines Lab announced on its official X handle that it was hiring candidates to join its team.

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.

Mira 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.” (AFP)

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.”

Thinking Machines Lab then announced on its official X handle on Wednesday, February 19, 2025, that it was hiring candidates to join its team.

It stated that its team so far consisted of “scientists, engineers, and builders behind some of the most widely used AI products and libraries, including ChatGPT, Character.ai, PyTorch, and Mistral” and that it is “committed to open science through publications and code releases, while focusing on human-AI collaboration that serves diverse domains.”

Meanwhile, Murati wrote on her official X handle that she “started Thinking Machines Lab alongside a remarkable team of scientists, engineers, and builders” to build three things:

• Helping people adapt AI systems to work for their specific needs.
• Developing strong foundations to build more capable AI systems
• Fostering a culture of open science that helps the whole field understand and improve these systems

“Our goal is simple, advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science, and practical applications,” she added.

However, the specifics of what Thinking Machines Lab plans to release still remains unclear, though it does state that it would frequently publish technical blog posts, papers, and code, as per its official website.

Thinking Machines Lab also states that instead of focusing solely on making fully autonomous AI systems, it would build multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively and can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise, enabling a broader spectrum of applications.

Big names working at Thinking Machines Lab

Some of the people working at Thinking Machines Lab include OpenAI co-founder John Schulman who is the Chief Scientist, CTO Barrett Zoph, the co-creator of ChatGPT and former VP of Research (post-training) at OpenAI, Alexander Kirillov who used to be the co-creator of Advanced Voice Mode at OpenAI and Segment Anything Model (SAM) at Meta AI, and many others from even established giants such as Google Deepmind, Character.ai, Mistral, and more.