Mira Murati AI Startup Launches With Some Familiar Faces

The artificial intelligence (AI) world has another player, after Thinking Machines Lab was launched this week to challenge the likes of OpenAI etc.

Thinking Machines Lab was created by OpenAI’s former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Mira Murati, who was among a bunch of sudden executive departures from OpenAI back in September 2024.

Among were the departures (besides Murati) was also OpenAI’s VP Research Barret Zoph and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew.

OpenAI departures

The high level departures came amid major structural changes to OpenAI’s non-profit status, coupled with a $6 billion (£4.5bn)-plus funding round.

Murati’s departure from OpenAI reportedly came as a surprise to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, after he said that Murati had only informed him on the morning of her announcement.

A month after her departure from OpenAI, it was reported that Mira Murati was raising funds (as much as $100m) for her new AI startup from venture capitalists.

It was reported at the time that Murati’s AI startup aimed to build AI products based on proprietary models.

Thinking Machines Lab

Now on Tuesday 18 February 2025, Murati tweeted on X (formerly Twitter) the launch of Thinking Machines Lab.

“Today, we are excited to announce Thinking Machines Lab (https://thinkingmachines.ai), an artificial intelligence research and product company,” she posted. “We are scientists, engineers, and builders behind some of the most widely used AI products and libraries, including ChatGPT, http://Character.ai, PyTorch, and Mistral.”

“Our mission is to make artificial intelligence work for you by building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI serve their unique needs,” she tweeted. “We are committed to open science through publications and code releases, while focusing on human-AI collaboration that serves diverse domains.”

“Our approach embraces co-design of research and products to enable learning from real-world deployment and rapid iteration,” she wrote. “This work requires three core foundations: state-of-the-art model intelligence, high-quality infrastructure, and advanced multimodal capabilities. We are committed to building models at the frontier of capabilities to deliver on this promise.”

Poached staff

Now Reuters has reported reported that Thinking Machines Lab’s began life with a team of about 30 leading researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Meta and Mistral.

Reuters noted that roughly two-thirds of the company comprises former OpenAI employees – including Barret Zoph, who left the ChatGPT maker on the same day as Murati last September.

Zoph will reportedly serve as the startup’s technology chief.

Meanwhile OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is now the startup’s chief scientist.

This is somewhat surprising, considering that in August 2024, John Schulman had tweeted on X that he had left OpenAI and joined rival AI company Anthropic AI, saying that he wanted to “focus on AI alignment” and “ return to hands-on technical work.”

But on 7 February 2025 Schulman had tweeted that he left Anthropic the previous week, as he “decided to go with another opportunity that I found extremely compelling.”