Mira Murati
CEO, Thinking Machines Lab
Mira Murati is the founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab and the former chief technology officer of OpenAI. She launched her lab with the largest seed round in history, drawing much of OpenAI's senior research talent with her.
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Born in Albania, Murati studied mechanical engineering at Dartmouth and worked at Tesla on the Model X before joining the augmented-reality startup Leap Motion. She joined OpenAI in 2018 and rose to chief technology officer, overseeing the development and launch of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and the GPT-4 generation.
During OpenAI's November 2023 leadership crisis she was briefly named interim CEO before Sam Altman's return. She left OpenAI in September 2024, and in February 2025 unveiled Thinking Machines Lab, recruiting a striking share of OpenAI's research leadership including RLHF pioneer John Schulman.
The new lab raised roughly $2 billion in a record seed round at a reported $12 billion valuation before shipping a product, then released Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-weight models. Murati's pedigree and the scale of that raise made her venture one of the most closely watched in AI.
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