{"id":"mira-murati","hidden":false,"ipfs":"QmRCyYJNtRDdtZNUrjuaLU6A9YwodDiouMRJ4tAFwf4Gap","language":"en","transactionHash":"0x8c295b447d4cdf5e42ca1db3ecb4c0c834d7bf1652277c93d2d1e8d585628f4c","created":"2025-07-29T20:10:54.285Z","updated":"2025-10-09T03:32:15.717Z","title":"Mira Murati","summary":"Mira Murati is an Albanian-American AI researcher and entrepreneur, former CTO and interim CEO of OpenAI, and the founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, an AI \"neolab\" focused on customizable multimodal interaction models.","content":"**Mira Murati** is an Albanian-American artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur, widely recognized for her role as the former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of OpenAI and a key figure in the development of generative AI models like ChatGPT and DALL-E. She is the founder and CEO of [Thinking Machines Lab](https://iq.wiki/wiki/thinking-machines-lab), an AI research and product company focused on developing collaborative and customizable AI systems. By 2026, Murati had become one of the most prominent leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, featured in profiles by publications such as _Fortune_ and included in Time’s 100 Most Influential People in AI list.[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2)​[\\[10\\]](#cite-id-7ovsjcq49a) Time’s 2026 profile characterized her approach as prioritizing customizable AI systems that preserve human agency in how advanced models are deployed and used.[\\[10\\]](#cite-id-7ovsjcq49a)​\n\n[YOUTUBE@VID](https://youtube.com/watch?v=p9Q5a1Vn-Hk)\n\n## Early Life\n\nMira Murati was born on December 16, 1988, in Vlorë, Albania.[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2) At the age of 16, she moved to Canada on a scholarship from United World Colleges to attend Pearson College on Vancouver Island, an international school that brings together students from dozens of countries.[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2) Growing up under a totalitarian communist regime in Albania, with both parents working as high school literature teachers, she has credited the environment's \"boredom\" with fostering her curiosity for knowledge and a passion for tinkering with computers, and has described having an “organic interest” in mathematics and science that led her to participate in academic Olympiads and competitions.[\\[1\\]](#cite-id-7ZflC6auLv)​[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2)​\n\n## Education\n\nMurati pursued higher education through a dual-degree program between Colby College and Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics at Colby College in 2011 and graduated in 2012 with a Bachelor of Engineering in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth.[\\[1\\]](#cite-id-7ZflC6auLv)​[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2)​\n\n## Career\n\nFollowing her graduation from Dartmouth, Murati’s early professional experience included a summer analyst internship at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo in 2011 and a role as an Advanced Concepts Engineer at Zodiac Aerospace from 2012 to 2013.[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2) She then joined Tesla in 2013 as a senior product manager on the Model X program, where she worked on the company's early-stage autopilot function, an experience that sparked her initial interest in artificial intelligence.[\\[1\\]](#cite-id-7ZflC6auLv)​[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2) In 2016, she moved to Leap Motion, an augmented-reality startup, where she served as vice president of product and engineering and focused on advancing human–computer interaction technologies.[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2)​\n\nIn June 2018, Murati joined OpenAI, a leading AI research and deployment company, as vice president of applied AI and partnerships. She later became senior vice president of research, product, and partnerships in 2020 and was promoted to Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in 2022.[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2) During her tenure, she played a pivotal role in the development and launch of AI models including the image-generation system DALL-E, the conversational AI ChatGPT, the programming-focused model [Codex](https://iq.wiki/wiki/codex), and the video model Sora, helping to scale OpenAI from a research lab into a major commercial organization.[\\[1\\]](#cite-id-7ZflC6auLv)​[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2) She was also instrumental in managing OpenAI's significant $13 billion partnership with Microsoft.[\\[1\\]](#cite-id-7ZflC6auLv) In November 2023, amidst a period of leadership instability at OpenAI, she briefly served as interim CEO following [Sam Altman](https://iq.wiki/wiki/sam-altman)’s removal by the board before his later reinstatement.[\\[1\\]](#cite-id-7ZflC6auLv)​[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2)​\n\nMurati’s time at OpenAI brought both recognition and controversy. She was ranked 57th on Fortune’s list of “The 100 Most Powerful Women in Business” in 2023 and featured in Time’s 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2024, and in June 2024 Dartmouth College awarded her an honorary Doctor of Science degree for her contributions to artificial intelligence and engineering.[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2) At a speaking engagement at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, she drew criticism for comments suggesting that “some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” which some observers viewed as insensitive to workers concerned about automation.[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2) Throughout this period, Murati frequently engaged in public discourse regarding the potential and risks of AI, emphasizing the importance of aligning AI models with human intention and ensuring they serve humanity, and has argued that companies like OpenAI need extensive input from regulators and governments to develop responsible AI governance.[\\[1\\]](#cite-id-7ZflC6auLv)​[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2)​\n\nMurati left OpenAI in September 2024 and founded [Thinking Machines Lab](https://iq.wiki/wiki/thinking-machines-lab) in February 2025, positioning the new company as an alternative to fully autonomous, closed AI systems by focusing on customizable models and human–AI collaboration.[\\[7\\]](#cite-id-pY7ELk2UH0)​[\\[1\\]](#cite-id-7ZflC6auLv)​[\\[10\\]](#cite-id-7ovsjcq49a)​\n\n[YOUTUBE@VID](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ba_C-C6UwlI)\n\n### Thinking Machines Lab\n\nIn February 2025, Mira Murati founded [Thinking Machines Lab](https://iq.wiki/wiki/thinking-machines-lab), an artificial intelligence research and product company, and became its CEO.[\\[4\\]](#cite-id-L5kQk2Fkur)​[\\[7\\]](#cite-id-pY7ELk2UH0) She established the company with a team of fellow OpenAI veterans, including co-founders John Schulman, Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng, [Andrew Tulloch](https://iq.wiki/wiki/andrew-tulloch), and Luke Metz.[\\[2\\]](#cite-id-kSsDSqnd7B)​[\\[1\\]](#cite-id-7ZflC6auLv)​[\\[8\\]](#cite-id-4Ib8mRkJuR) The lab’s stated mission is to make frontier AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable, with an emphasis on human–AI collaboration rather than fully autonomous systems.[\\[2\\]](#cite-id-kSsDSqnd7B)​\n\nMurati has described Thinking Machines as building multimodal AI that interacts with humans “through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate,” and has framed the company’s work as developing “interaction models” that process continuous streams of audio, text, and video in near real time, rather than relying solely on turn-based prompts.[\\[4\\]](#cite-id-L5kQk2Fkur)​[\\[11\\]](#cite-id-99pv2aw3ex)​[\\[12\\]](#cite-id-l76fjav6xr) In a 2026 interview, she compared these systems to a “tandem bike,” arguing that advanced AI should augment rather than replace human decision-making and that keeping people continuously involved in shaping system behavior is key to preserving human agency.[\\[12\\]](#cite-id-l76fjav6xr)​[\\[10\\]](#cite-id-7ovsjcq49a) Time’s 2026 Time100 AI profile similarly emphasized her focus on building customizable models that keep humans in control of how powerful systems are adapted to specific tasks.[\\[10\\]](#cite-id-7ovsjcq49a) As part of this strategy, the company previewed a multimodal interaction model called TML-Interaction-Small, designed to collaborate with users in near real time.[\\[12\\]](#cite-id-l76fjav6xr)​\n\nIn July 2025, [Thinking Machines Lab](https://iq.wiki/wiki/thinking-machines-lab) announced a $2 billion seed funding round valuing the company at $12 billion, and in March 2026 it signed a deal with Nvidia to secure next-generation chips to support its models and infrastructure.[\\[3\\]](#cite-id-f86Y8SP6BS)​[\\[4\\]](#cite-id-L5kQk2Fkur)​[\\[10\\]](#cite-id-7ovsjcq49a) According to subsequent financial press reports, that agreement covers at least 1 gigawatt of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems under a multi-year supply arrangement and positioned Nvidia to become the largest participant in a planned multi-billion-dollar funding round, which would reportedly value Thinking Machines at around $40 billion if completed.[\\[14\\]](#cite-id-ps9z2g5rhs) In July 2026, the company released its first generally available AI model, Inkling, an open-weight model designed as a versatile and efficient generalist that balances cost against performance and can be downloaded and customized by developers.[\\[13\\]](#cite-id-b0qqum02au)​[\\[10\\]](#cite-id-7ovsjcq49a) Thinking Machines has stated that Inkling is intended to perform strongly across a wide range of benchmarks but does not aim to be the single strongest model available, and it presents Inkling as a building block for more personalized, interaction-centric systems.[\\[13\\]](#cite-id-b0qqum02au)​[\\[10\\]](#cite-id-7ovsjcq49a) Company materials and press coverage describe Inkling as a 975-billion-parameter system with 41 billion active parameters, supporting text, image, and audio inputs and offering context windows reportedly up to around 1 million tokens.[\\[13\\]](#cite-id-b0qqum02au)​[\\[14\\]](#cite-id-ps9z2g5rhs)​\n\nAlongside its technical ambitions, the company has faced leadership and organizational challenges. Meta’s Superintelligence Labs has recruited several founding researchers from Thinking Machines, and other employees have departed for firms such as OpenAI, prompting questions about retention at a highly funded but still young lab.[\\[12\\]](#cite-id-l76fjav6xr)​[\\[13\\]](#cite-id-b0qqum02au)​[\\[10\\]](#cite-id-7ovsjcq49a) Public reporting in 2026 indicated that, within roughly 19 months of Tinker’s launch, usage of Tinker and related fine-tuning services had pushed Thinking Machines’ annualized revenue to just over $100 million, with customers primarily billed based on compute usage.[\\[14\\]](#cite-id-ps9z2g5rhs) Murati has publicly characterized this turnover as part of the compressed volatility of building a frontier AI organization and has argued that the company should be judged primarily by the systems and tools it delivers.[\\[11\\]](#cite-id-99pv2aw3ex)​[\\[10\\]](#cite-id-7ovsjcq49a)​\n\n### Tinker Product Launch\n\nIn October 2025, [Thinking Machines Lab](https://iq.wiki/wiki/thinking-machines-lab) launched its first product, a tool named Tinker. The product is designed to automate the process of creating custom frontier AI models, making advanced AI fine-tuning more accessible to researchers, developers, and businesses. The company's stated goal for Tinker is to empower more people to experiment with and conduct research on frontier AI systems.[\\[8\\]](#cite-id-4Ib8mRkJuR)​[\\[9\\]](#cite-id-ref-2)​\n\nTinker automates complex tasks such as managing GPU clusters and stabilizing large-scale training runs. It allows users to fine-tune open-source models, initially supporting Meta’s Llama and Alibaba’s Qwen, through methods like supervised learning and reinforcement learning. Upon launch, the company began allowing users to apply for access to the Tinker API, which was initially offered for free. Murati expressed hope that making these tools more widely available would help reverse the trend of leading AI models becoming increasingly closed and proprietary.[\\[8\\]](#cite-id-4Ib8mRkJuR) As Thinking Machines’ product portfolio expanded, Tinker became the startup’s primary source of revenue, with the company selling the tool to enterprise customers such as hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, which uses fine-tuning to improve AI performance on financial tasks.[\\[13\\]](#cite-id-b0qqum02au) By 2026, financial press reports indicated that Tinker and associated fine-tuning services had driven Thinking Machines’ annualized revenue to just over $100 million within roughly 19 months of launch, with customers paying based largely on the compute resources their workloads consumed, a revenue profile cited as underpinning investor interest in a large potential funding round.[\\[14\\]](#cite-id-ps9z2g5rhs)​\n\n### Funding and Valuation\n\nIn July 2025, [Thinking Machines Lab](https://iq.wiki/wiki/thinking-machines-lab) secured a historic $2 billion in seed funding, valuing the company at $12 billion. This marked the largest seed financing round in venture capital history. The funding round was led by [Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)](https://iq.wiki/wiki/andreessen-horowitz), with additional investment from prominent investors including Accel, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Nvidia, Cisco, ServiceNow, and [Jane Street](https://iq.wiki/wiki/jane-street). The Albanian government was also an early investor, contributing €8.8 million to the startup.[\\[3\\]](#cite-id-f86Y8SP6BS)​[\\[1\\]](#cite-id-7ZflC6auLv)​[\\[4\\]](#cite-id-L5kQk2Fkur)​[\\[7\\]](#cite-id-pY7ELk2UH0) In March 2026, Thinking Machines expanded its relationship with Nvidia by signing a deal for next-generation chips to power its frontier models and interaction-focused infrastructure.[\\[10\\]](#cite-id-7ovsjcq49a) Later press reports stated that Nvidia was in discussions to invest between $2.5 billion and $3 billion as the largest participant in a planned $5–$6 billion funding round that could value Thinking Machines at a pre-money valuation of at least $40 billion, while noting that these figures reflected proposed terms rather than a completed transaction.[\\[14\\]](#cite-id-ps9z2g5rhs)​\n\n### Team and Recruitment\n\nThe team at [Thinking Machines Lab](https://iq.wiki/wiki/thinking-machines-lab) comprises experienced scientists, engineers, and builders who have contributed to widely used AI products and open-source projects. These include ChatGPT, Character.ai, open-weights models like Mistral, and popular open-source projects such as PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq, and Segment Anything.[\\[2\\]](#cite-id-kSsDSqnd7B) The leadership team includes Murati as CEO, [Soumith Chintala](https://iq.wiki/wiki/soumith-chintala) as CTO after his move from Meta, and John Schulman as chief scientist, with Lilian Weng joining as a founding member after serving as a vice president at OpenAI.[\\[12\\]](#cite-id-l76fjav6xr)​\n\nThe company has attracted significant attention for its talent, offering highly competitive compensation to secure top AI professionals. Federal hiring data from the first quarter of 2025 showed [Thinking Machines Lab](https://iq.wiki/wiki/thinking-machines-lab) paying technical staff base salaries ranging from $450,000 to $500,000. These figures do not include additional lucrative sign-on bonuses and equity awards, which are often substantial in the highly competitive AI talent market, with total compensation packages for top talent in the field reportedly reaching up to $1 million or more.[\\[6\\]](#cite-id-rDH0TgGf04) In July 2025, Meta's Superintelligence Labs reportedly approached more than a dozen staffers at [Thinking Machines Lab](https://iq.wiki/wiki/thinking-machines-lab), with one individual receiving an offer exceeding $1 billion to join Meta.[\\[5\\]](#cite-id-VVwLLRRYeW) In the following months, Meta’s lab successfully hired several founding members of Thinking Machines, including engineer Joshua Gross, while other researchers left for organizations such as OpenAI, creating ongoing retention challenges for the startup despite its strong funding and profile.[\\[12\\]](#cite-id-l76fjav6xr)​[\\[13\\]](#cite-id-b0qqum02au)​[\\[10\\]](#cite-id-7ovsjcq49a) Murati has publicly argued that intense competition for talent and staff turnover are part of the reality of building a frontier AI lab and has emphasized that the company’s success should be evaluated by the models and tools it brings into use rather than by how many original employees remain.[\\[11\\]](#cite-id-99pv2aw3ex)​[\\[10\\]](#cite-id-7ovsjcq49a)​\n\n[YOUTUBE@VID](https://youtube.com/watch?v=KpWNCQnHg20)\n","recentActivity":null,"operator":{"id":"0x1E23b34d3106F0C1c74D17f2Cd0F65cdb039b138"},"categories":[{"id":"people","title":"People in crypto"}],"tags":[{"id":"Founder"},{"id":"Speaker"},{"id":"Researcher"}],"images":[{"id":"QmNvEBZy7dkbejgZApXHv1j4Eb5kwwjDvgxwdWSv51skLK","type":"image/jpeg, 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