OpenAI's former chief technology officer starts her own company

Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI who unexpectedly left the company in September, has helped found a new artificial intelligence startup called Thinking Machines Lab, adding to the wave of young companies that have been formed in the race to lead AI.

Thinking Machines Lab aims to "make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable," according to a blog post from the new company. It said it would freely share its technologies with outside researchers and companies, a practice known as "open source."



Thinking Machines Lab declined to say if it has raised money.

Murati, 36, was among OpenAI's top executives and researchers who left the company after the surprise ouster of its CEO, Sam Altman, in November 2023 and his reinstatement five days later. Some of them had clashed with Altman over the direction of OpenAI and its philosophy over AI, a powerful technology that has implications for jobs and society.

Other former OpenAI executives, including co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, have since created their own AI companies. Their startups, along with giant companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft, are part of the global race to build increasingly powerful AI technologies.

OpenAI captured the world's imagination in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, an online chatbot that could answer questions, write term papers, generate computer code and mimic human conversation. Altman became a face of the AI movement.

But in November 2023, four OpenAI board members ousted him, saying they could not trust him with the company's plan to one day create a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. Murati, who joined OpenAI in 2018, was named to lead the company after Altman's removal, but she rejected the role two days later. She stayed on at OpenAI after Altman returned.

The Times reported last year that Murati had written a private memo to Altman in the months before his ouster, raising questions about his management and sharing the memo with OpenAI's board. A lawyer for Murati denied the claims at the time.

When she left OpenAI, Murati said she was stepping away to "create the time and space to do my own exploration." She did not provide details.