Mira Murati
Co-founder and CEO, Thinking Machines Lab
Engineering at Tesla and Leap Motion
Mira Murati earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering[1]. At Tesla Motors she led the design, development and launch of vehicle products including the Model X, as well as programmes in aerospace[1]. She then managed the product and engineering teams at Leap Motion[1].
Six years at OpenAI
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 as vice president of applied AI and partnerships[2]. At OpenAI she led hardware strategy, managed the reinforcement learning and safety research teams, and led product and deployment[1]. She was promoted to chief technology officer in 2022 and led the company's work on ChatGPT, the image model DALL-E and the code-generating system Codex[2]. A 2022 MIT Technology Review speaker biography described her as overseeing research, product development and deployment at OpenAI[1].
She left OpenAI in October 2024 after six years at the company, saying at the time that she was stepping away to do her own exploration[2]. TechCrunch later summarised her OpenAI tenure as six years, two of them as CTO[6].
Founding Thinking Machines Lab
On 18 February 2025 Murati announced Thinking Machines Lab, with herself as CEO, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as chief scientist and Barret Zoph as CTO[2]. The company describes itself as an AI research and product company that wants to make AI systems more widely understood, customisable and generally capable[3]. It says it will publish technical blog posts, papers and code, and that it is building multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively[3].
In July 2025 the company closed a $2 billion seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD and Jane Street taking part, at a $12 billion valuation[4]. TechCrunch described it as one of the largest seed rounds in Silicon Valley history[4]. On 10 March 2026 Thinking Machines and NVIDIA announced a multi-year partnership to deploy at least one gigawatt of NVIDIA Vera Rubin systems for the lab's model training, and NVIDIA also invested in the company[7]. Fortune reported in 2026 that the company had more than 150 staff, four times its size at launch[8].
Tinker, Inkling and interaction models
The lab's first product, Tinker, launched on 1 October 2025 as an API for fine-tuning open-weight language models[5]. Tinker runs on the company's own training clusters and uses LoRA so that many training runs can share the same pool of compute[5]. Groups at Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley and Redwood Research used it before launch[5].
On 15 July 2026 the company released Inkling, its first open-weights model, which it says it trained from scratch[9]. Inkling is a mixture-of-experts transformer with 975 billion total parameters and 41 billion active, and it supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens[9]. The company said Inkling is not the strongest overall model available but is meant as an open base for customisation on Tinker[9]. It released Inkling 2 Small on 5 November 2026[10].
In a June 2026 Bloomberg interview, her first major media appearance in about 18 months, Murati previewed what the lab calls interaction models[6]. She said these models process continuous streams of audio, text and video in 200-millisecond intervals rather than in turns[6]. In a July 2026 essay, Thinking Machines stated its mission as building AI that extends human will and judgment[11].
Known for
- Chief technology officer of OpenAI, 2022 to 2024
- Founding Thinking Machines Lab
- Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open models
- The Inkling open-weights model
Sources
- MIT Technology Review EmTech Digital 2022: speaker biography, Mira Murati — checked 6 Nov 2026
- TechCrunch: Thinking Machines Lab is ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's new startup, February 2025 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Thinking Machines Lab: home page — checked 6 Nov 2026
- TechCrunch: Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is worth $12B in seed round, July 2025 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Thinking Machines Lab: Announcing Tinker, October 2025 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- TechCrunch: Mira Murati steps back into the spotlight, carefully, June 2026 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Thinking Machines Lab: Thinking Machines Lab and NVIDIA announce long-term strategic partnership, March 2026 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Fortune: Most Powerful Women 2026, Mira Murati — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Thinking Machines Lab: Inkling, our open-weights model, July 2026 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Thinking Machines Lab: News — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Thinking Machines Lab: The Future Worth Building Is Human, July 2026 — checked 6 Nov 2026