Thinking Machines Lab is an AI business founded by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati with the goal of promoting open science, human-AI collaboration, and AI alignment. A notable addition to the expanding trend of OpenAI alumni-led enterprises, the company was formally introduced on February 18, 2025, and features a leadership team of well-known AI researchers. Its mission is to develop flexible, moral AI systems while also making contributions to the larger AI research community.
A Collaborative Approach To AI Development
The three main goals of Thinking Machines Lab are to support open science in AI research, provide the groundwork for more powerful AI, and customize AI systems to meet the needs of particular users. The company wants to develop AI by making it widely applicable and intelligible through open science, sound foundations, and real-world applications. Thinking Machines Lab places a strong emphasis on human-AI collaboration, creating multimodal systems that collaborate with humans, in contrast to businesses that only concentrate on autonomous AI. This strategy is to develop AI systems that are more adaptive, flexible, and customized so they may be used in a wider range of human domains and sectors.
The Thinking Machines Leadership Team
John Schulman, a Berkeley graduate and the creator of ChatGPT, has put together a formidable group of AI specialists at his Thinking Machines Lab, overseen by CEO Mira Murati. Former OpenAI Vice President of Research Barret Zoph serves as CTO, and OpenAI co-founder John Schulman serves as Chief Scientist. About two-thirds of the startup’s 29-member team are former OpenAI personnel, demonstrating its ability to draw in top talent from major AI companies. The fact that other team members come from well-known businesses like Character AI, Google DeepMind, and Meta shows how popular Murati’s new endeavor in the AI sector is.
Startups With OpenAI Alumni
This famous OpenAI image only features one guy left | Fortune
The industrial environment has changed as a result of the departure of prominent people from OpenAI, which has given rise to a number of significant AI firms. Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), founded in June 2024 by Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist of OpenAI, is reportedly raising more than $1 billion at a valuation of more than $30 billion. In a similar vein, Dario and Daniela Amodei established Anthropic in 2021, with Dario serving as CEO and concentrating on safety and AI skills.
Given how dynamic the AI business is, these new endeavors have drawn a sizable amount of financing. Tech behemoths like Amazon and Google have invested billions of dollars in Anthropic, while SSI raised $1 billion in its first round of funding. With each firm offering a distinct strategy to tackle the opportunities and difficulties in the industry, the trend of former OpenAI executives launching their own businesses has the potential to accelerate innovation in AI research and safety.
Pay Attention To AI Alignment
In order to include human values into AI models and advance AI safety research, Thinking Machines Lab places a high priority on AI alignment. In order to ensure that AI systems are built with an emphasis on ethical issues and human-AI collaboration, the startup’s methodology entails co-design between research and product teams. The startup hopes to advance transparency and cooperation within the AI community by contributing to the larger area of AI alignment research through the release of code, datasets, and model specifications. This emphasis on safety and alignment tackles important issues in the field, especially the discrepancy between AI’s capabilities and human comprehension, and it may have an impact on how AI is developed and used in the future.