Mira Murati’s AI startup gains prominent ex-OpenAI advisers
▼ Summary
– Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati founded Thinking Machines Lab and enlisted Bob McGrew and Alec Radford as advisors.
– Bob McGrew, who joined OpenAI in 2017 and became chief research officer, stepped down in September 2024.
– Alec Radford, known for his work on GPTs and other models, left OpenAI to pursue independent research.
– Thinking Machines Lab aims to develop comprehensible, customizable, and broadly capable AI systems.
– Mira Murati is reportedly seeking over $100 million in funding and has assembled a team from top AI labs like OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
Former OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati, has made significant strides with her new AI initiative, Thinking Machines Lab, by enlisting two highly regarded advisors: Bob McGrew, the ex-chief research officer at OpenAI, and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher credited with several groundbreaking innovations.
In March, the website for Thinking Machines Lab discreetly updated its roster to include McGrew and Radford. The startup has not yet provided any official comments in response to inquiries.
Bob McGrew began his journey with OpenAI in 2017 as part of the technical staff, ascending to the position of VP of research in 2018, and eventually becoming the chief research officer. He stepped down in September 2024, expressing a desire to take a “break” from his duties.
Alec Radford left OpenAI at the end of last year to focus on independent research after nearly a decade at the organization. He is renowned for leading the authorship of the influential research paper on generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs), which form the backbone of OpenAI’s most notable offerings, such as ChatGPT. Radford also contributed to various models within the GPT series, the speech recognition model Whisper, and the image-generation model DALL-E.
Although Thinking Machines Lab has kept its research focus and product plans somewhat under wraps, a February announcement hinted at the startup’s aspirations: to develop tools that cater to individual AI needs and goals, and to build AI systems that are more comprehensible, customizable, and broadly capable than those currently available.
At the helm of Thinking Machines Lab is Mira Murati, serving as CEO. Joining her are OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as the chief scientist and Barret Zoph, former leader of model post-training at OpenAI, who is now the CTO.
Mira Murati exited OpenAI in October last year after a six-year tenure. She initially joined as VP of applied AI and partnerships, later advancing to the role of CTO in 2022. During her time at OpenAI, she spearheaded significant projects, including ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Codex, the code-generation system that powered early versions of GitHub’s Copilot.
Reports have surfaced that Murati has been in discussions to secure over $100 million in funding from undisclosed VC firms for Thinking Machines Lab. The startup boasts a team comprising numerous employees from leading AI laboratories, such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
(Source: TechCrunch)
