Last September Mira Murati unexpectedly left her job as Chief Technology Officer of OpenAi and said, “I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” The rumor in Silicon Valley was that she was resigning to start her own business. Today she announced that she is indeed the CEO of a new general benefit company called Thinking Machines Lab. Her mission is the development of first -class AI with a view to making useful and accessible.
Murati believes that there is a serious gap between rapidly advancing AI and the understanding of the public about technology. Even advanced scientists do not have a strong understanding of the possibilities and limitations of AI. Thinking Machines Lab is planning to fill that gap by building in accessibility from the start. It also promises to share his work by publishing technical notes, articles and actual code.
Submitting this strategy is the conviction of Murati that we are still in the early stages of AI, and the competition is far from closed. Although it took place after Murati started planning her lab, the rise of Deepseek-Die claimed to build advanced reasoning models for a fraction of the usual cost-hair thinking that newcomers can compete with more efficient models.
Thinking Machines Lab, however, will compete on the highest part of large language models. “Ultimately, the most advanced models will unlock the most transformative applications and benefits, such as making new scientific discoveries and technical breakthroughs possible,” the company writes on Tuesday in a blog post. Although the term “Agi” is not used, Thinking Machines Lab believes that solving the possibilities of its models to the highest level is important to fill the gap it has identified. Building those models, even with the efficiency of the Deepseek era, will be expensive. Although the Thinking Machines lab has not yet shared its financing partners, it is convinced that it will collect the necessary millions.
Murati's Pitch has attracted an impressive team of researchers and scientists, many of whom have open on their CV. They include former VP of Research Barret Zoph (who is now CTO at Thinking Machines Lab), multimodal research head Alexander Kiillov, head of special projects John Lachman, and top researcher Luke Metz, who opened AI a few months earlier. The chief scientist of the lab will be John Schulman, an important chatgpt -inventer who only left for Anthropic last summer. Others come from competitors such as Google and Mistral AI.
The team moved to an office in San Francisco at the end of last year and has already started working on a number of projects. Although it is not clear what his products will look like, Thinking Machines Lab indicates that they will not be copycats from chatgpt or claude, but AI models that optimize the collaboration between people and AI – that Murati sees as the current bottleneck in the field.
The American inventor Danny Hillis dreamed of this collaboration between people and machines more than 30 years ago. A protégé by AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, Hillis built a supercomputer with powerful chips that run parallel – a precursor of the clusters who are running today AI. He called it thinking machines. Before the time is, thinking machines declared bankrupt in 1994. Now is a variation in his name, and perhaps his inheritance, is Murati.
