ChatGPT’s mother announces entrepreneurship, with new team members mostly from OpenAI

This is another former OpenAI core executive who has chosen to start his own business, following OpenAI co-founder Ilya Suzkevi.

On February 19th, Mira Murati, former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, officially announced the establishment of a new company called Thinking Machines Lab on social platform X. This is another former OpenAI core executive who has chosen to start his own business, following OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever.

Mira Murati was born in Albania in 1988 and moved to Canada at the age of 16. She graduated from Dartmouth College in the United States with a degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2012. She has worked as an intern analyst at Goldman Sachs, a senior concept engineer at French aerospace company Zodiac Aerospace, and a senior product manager for Tesla Model X, leading the development of Autopilot assisted driving software.

After joining OpenAI in 2018, she rose through the ranks and led the development of flagship products such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex, and GPT-4, earning her the nickname “the mother of ChatGPT”.

In 2022, she was promoted to Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI and briefly served as interim CEO during the internal turmoil of OpenAI in 2023, pushing for the reinstatement of Sam Altman. Last September, Murati suddenly resigned, and there were rumors at the time that he was secretly preparing to start a business.

The newly established Thinking Machines Lab is committed to building artificial intelligence models and products that support “human AI collaboration”, aiming to cover a wider range of work areas.

Its team has a strong lineup, with over 20 out of 29 members from OpenAI. The core members include OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as Chief Scientist, former Vice President of Research Barret Zoph as Chief Technology Officer, and former Vice President of Security Research Lilian Weng.

Murati proposed three core goals for the new company: firstly, to assist users in adjusting their AI systems to meet specific needs; The second is to build a more rational AI infrastructure, laying a solid foundation for more powerful AI systems; The third is to create a culture of open science, plan to regularly publish technical blogs, research papers, and open source code, and promote understanding and development in the global AI field.

This company has not yet launched a specific product or model, but with its entrepreneurial philosophy and strong team background, it has attracted the attention of the capital market. According to informed sources, Murati is in talks with venture capital firms regarding financing, with an expected scale of $1 billion.

In recent years, it has become a trend for OpenAI executives to resign and start businesses. In June 2024, Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, founded Safe Superintelligence, dedicated to developing secure superintelligence systems. The company completed a $1 billion financing just 11 weeks after its establishment, with a valuation of over $30 billion. In addition, Dario Amodei, former Vice President of Research at OpenAI, and others have also established their own AI companies, further intensifying industry competition.

The collective departure of OpenAI executives indicates the enormous development potential and market space of the AI industry, while also exposing the differences in technology roadmap and development direction within the industry. With the addition of more top talents and the influx of capital, the AI industry may usher in a new round of technological breakthroughs and business changes.