Mira Murati, Founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, is one of the most closely watched figures in the AI industry today. Before starting her own company, Murati spent six and a half years at OpenAI, ultimately serving as Chief Technology Officer, where she played a central role in the development and deployment of some of the most influential AI systems of the past decade. She announced her departure from OpenAI in September 2024.
In February 2025, Murati launched Thinking Machines Lab in San Francisco, quickly assembling a team that included OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist John Schulman. The company closed the largest seed round in AI history that July, raising roughly $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation, with backing from Andreessen Horowitz and even a $10 million investment from the government of Albania, Murati’s country of origin.
After nearly 18 months of relative public silence, Murati reemerged at Bloomberg Tech 2026 to unveil the company’s strategic direction: “interaction models,” a new category of AI designed for continuous, real-time dialogue rather than one-off prompts and responses, targeting response latencies as low as 200 milliseconds — roughly the speed of a human blink. Thinking Machines released its first product, Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-source models, followed by its first full AI model, Inkling, in July 2026.
While reports of a potential $50 billion valuation round did not materialize, Thinking Machines has secured major infrastructure partnerships with Nvidia and Google Cloud, and continues to grow its team and product lineup. Murati’s approach — releasing research and benchmarks ahead of fully scaled models — has drawn comparisons to how DeepMind and Anthropic have historically shaped industry conversations before competitors could set the terms.
