Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, has launched a new AI startup named Thinking Machines Lab. This newly formed company aims to make AI systems more understandable, customizable, and generally capable. To promote transparency, it plans to regularly publish technical research and code. Murati will join in the likes of other OpenAI senior execs such co-founder Ilya Sutskever , who have gone on to found their own AI companies.
Murati’s new startup, Thinking Machines Lab, has assembled a powerhouse team of AI experts, signaling serious competition in the AI space. While Mira Murati will head the company as CEO, the team includes notable researchers from OpenAI, Google, and Mistral AI, such as John Schulman, a key figure behind ChatGPT. Their mission centers on creating AI models that enhance human-AI collaboration, leveraging cost-efficient advancements.
“We are scientists, engineers, and builders who’ve created some of the most widely used AI products, including ChatGPT and Character.ai, open-weights models like Mistral, as well as popular open source projects like PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq, and Segment Anything,” the company announced in a blog post.
Speaking of details, the company claims that it wants to ensure more people (not just large tech companies) can understand, access, and customize advanced AI systems. Many believe that AI technology is often locked within a few elite labs (like OpenAI and Google DeepMind), limiting public understanding and innovation. And now, Thinking Machines Lab is promising to break down those barriers.
In technical terms, Thinking Machines Lab aims to compete at the cutting edge of large language model (LLM) development. While the company doesn’t directly mention Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), it emphasizes that the most advanced models will drive groundbreaking applications, such as scientific discoveries and engineering innovations. The company acknowledges that scaling these models to the highest performance levels is crucial for addressing unmet needs in the current AI landscape.
“We see multimodality as critical to enabling more natural and efficient communication, preserving more information, better-capturing intent, and supporting deeper integration into real-world environments,” the startup said.
The development comes at a time when the AI race is becoming more intense, especially with the arrival of low-cost alternatives like DeepSeek. In fact, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s AI startup, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), is raising $1 billion at a valuation of over $30 billion. Meanwhile, the global AI market is expected to grow at an annual rate of 27.67% between 2025-30, reaching a total value of $826.7 billion.
