It’s well known about the internal operation of the Thinking Machine Lab, an AI startup launched by former Openai executive Mira Murati. The company has not released an official product yet, but that has not stopped major supporters. Investors including NVIDIA, AMD and Jane Street have just contributed a staggering $2 billion seed round, one of the largest seeds in Silicon Valley history.
Murati announced the round yesterday (July 15), Murati said in an X post: “Thinking about the existence of the Machine Lab is to enhance human abilities. She added: “We are building multimodal AI to work with you through vision, through visual dialogue, through our collaborative ways, and interact with the world’s nature.” ”
Murati’s star power in the tech industry appears to be the main driver of investor confidence, even if the company keeps most of its progress on. She spent six years at Openai, most recently as Chief Technology Officer, after having worked as product manager at Tesla in 2023, and Murati, 36, briefly served as Interim CEO of OpenAI during Sam Altman’s interim dispersion. She left the company later that year and “created her own time and space to explore.”
With the launch of the Thinking Machine Lab, this exploration took shape in February. The company attracts talent from the AI landscape, including former researchers from Google, Meta and Mistral AI, as well as many OpenAI alumni. Famous names on the team include John Schulman, Luke Metz, Lillian Weng and Barret Zoph, who are now the CTO of startups.
According to Murati, the startup is preparing to launch its first product in the coming months. It will “include an important open source component that is useful for researchers and startups developing custom models,” she said. The startup is also actively hiring, with a focus on people’s passion for turning research into “useful things.”
Murati is the latest in a growing list of former Openai executives who run high-profile businesses themselves. Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist at Openai, left Secure Super Intelligence (SSI), a secret startup focused on the advanced form of AI SSI, valued at $32 billion earlier this year.
Another major player, Anthropic, was founded in 2020 by former Vice President of Dario Amodei, Openai Research. The security-focused company raised $3.5 billion in May, pushing its valuation to $61.5 billion.
In addition to product launches, Think Machine Lab plans to share its research with the wider AI community. Murati said the goal is to help deepen understanding of the border system. “We believe that AI should be an extension of individual agents, in the spirit of freedom, and should be distributed as broadly and fairly as possible,” she said.
