Mira Murati

Mira Murati (born 1988) is the founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab. Born in Albania, she studied mechanical engineering at Dartmouth, worked on the Model X at Tesla and augmented reality at Leap Motion, then joined OpenAI in 2018. As chief technology officer from 2022, she led development and deployment of the products that defined the boom — ChatGPT, DALL·E, and GPT-4 — and served as interim CEO for two days during the November 2023 ouster of Sam Altman.

From ChatGPT to Thinking Machines

Murati left OpenAI in September 2024 and unveiled Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025, pulling a string of senior OpenAI researchers with her. The startup raised a record-shattering $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation, and its mission statement stakes out a distinct position: AI systems should be “more widely understood, customizable and generally capable,” built for human-AI collaboration rather than full autonomy. Its first product, Tinker, launched in October 2025 as a tool for fine-tuning open-weights models.

Her optimism has a scar on it. At Dartmouth in June 2024 she remarked that some creative jobs displaced by AI “maybe shouldn’t have been there in the first place” if their output was low quality — a line that drew furious backlash from artists and writers and still trails her as shorthand for Silicon Valley’s indifference. In fuller context she was arguing AI would become a collaborative tool for elevating creative work; the compressed version became a battle standard for the other side.