Builder
Mira Murati
CEO and co-founder, Thinking Machines Lab
Mira Murati is co-founder and chief executive of Thinking Machines Lab, the AI research and product company she launched in February 2025 after leaving OpenAI.
Murati began her career as a product manager at Tesla, working on the Model X from 2013 to 2016, then led product and engineering at the augmented reality company Leap Motion. She joined OpenAI in 2018 as vice president of applied AI and partnerships and became chief technology officer in May 2022. In that role she oversaw the development and release of ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex and Sora. During the November 2023 board crisis she served as interim CEO for three days before Sam Altman’s return. She announced her departure from OpenAI in September 2024, saying she wanted to “do my own exploration.”
Thinking Machines Lab launched as a public benefit corporation with a founding team that included several senior OpenAI researchers. In July 2025 it raised about $2 billion in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $12 billion valuation. The company’s first product, Tinker, is a platform for building and fine-tuning custom models. In July 2026 it released Inkling, an open-weight multimodal model, and in September 2026 it was reported to be raising more than $1 billion at a valuation above $40 billion.
Murati has framed the company’s mission around making AI systems more understandable, customisable and broadly useful, with research shared openly. She does not use the term Super Intelligence in describing its goals.