Person
Mira Murati
Mira Murati was OpenAI's chief technology officer through the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4 and the voice-and-vision model GPT-4o, and briefly served as interim chief executive during the November 2023 board crisis. She left in September 2024 and, in early 2025, launched Thinking Machines Lab, a research company staffed heavily by former OpenAI colleagues. It raised a $2 billion seed round before shipping anything, released a fine-tuning tool called Tinker, and in 2026 put out its first open-weight model. Her venture is often cited as evidence of how far reputation alone could attract funding and talent in the frontier-lab market.
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- Labs & people 6
- Models & capabilities 4
- Money & business 2
- Open weights & ecosystem 1
- Courts & copyright 1
- Ideas & essays 1
- Culture & impact 1
Thinking Machines Lab releases open-weight model Inkling
The 975-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model was pitched not as the strongest available but as a base for enterprise fine-tuning through the lab's Tinker platform.
Models & capabilities · Open weights & ecosystem
Thinking Machines Lab previews interaction models
The voice models are built to interrupt and add context mid-conversation rather than wait for a speaker to finish, unlike conventional turn-based voice assistants.
Models & capabilities
Musk v Altman/OpenAI trial begins
Musk sought as much as $134bn in damages to be paid to OpenAI's charity, plus Altman's removal from the board, in a case tried before a nine-member advisory jury in Oakland.
Courts & copyright · Money & business · Labs & people
Ilya Sutskever's deposition reveals details of the 2023 OpenAI board conflict
Sutskever testified that most of the allegations behind his 52-page memo against Altman came secondhand from Mira Murati and were never independently verified.
Labs & people
Thinking Machines Lab launches Tinker
The former OpenAI CTO's company shipped its first product: a managed fine-tuning API for open-weight models including large mixture-of-experts systems, free during a private beta.
Models & capabilities
Thinking Machines Lab launches Connectionism research blog
The inaugural post identified batch-size-dependent kernels, not floating-point concurrency, as the real cause of non-reproducible LLM outputs, and showed a fix producing identical completions across 1,000 runs.
Ideas & essays
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab raises $2bn seed at $12bn valuation
Thinking Machines Lab, founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, raised the largest seed round on record at $2bn, valuing the five-month-old company at $12bn.
Money & business · Labs & people
Thinking Machines Lab launches
The founding team of roughly 30 researchers, drawn heavily from OpenAI, had no public product and disclosed no funding figure at launch.
Labs & people
Mira Murati and two research leaders quit OpenAI on the same day
Murati cited wanting time for her own exploration; she went on to found Thinking Machines Lab, and Altman called the departures independent and amicable.
Labs & people
OpenAI launches GPT-4o with real-time voice
A single model handling text, vision and audio end to end, with conversational latency — and a voice that led to a public dispute with Scarlett Johansson.
Models & capabilities · Culture & impact
Sam Altman returns as CEO with a new initial board
The three-person interim board — Bret Taylor, Larry Summers and Adam D'Angelo, the only holdover from the board that fired him — replaced the four who had voted him out.
Labs & people