Mira Murati is an Albanian-American artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur, widely recognized for her role as the former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of OpenAI and a key figure in the development of generative AI models like ChatGPT and DALL-E. She is the founder of Thinking Machines Lab, an AI research and product company focused on developing collaborative and customizable AI systems.

Early Life

Mira Murati was born in Albania in 1988. At the age of 16, she moved to Canada on a scholarship to attend an international school. Growing up under a totalitarian communist regime in Albania, she has credited the environment's "boredom" with fostering her curiosity for knowledge and a passion for tinkering with computers. ^[1]

Education

Murati pursued higher education at Dartmouth College, where she graduated in 2012 with a degree in mechanical engineering. ^[1]

Career

Following her graduation from Dartmouth, Murati began her career at Tesla, where she worked on the company's early-stage autopilot function. This experience sparked her initial interest in artificial intelligence. She later transitioned to Leap Motion, where she led product and engineering teams. ^[1]

In 2018, Murati joined OpenAI, a leading AI research and deployment company. During her tenure, she played a pivotal role in the development and launch of groundbreaking AI models, including the image-generation system DALL-E and the conversational AI, ChatGPT. She rose to the position of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at OpenAI. Murati was also instrumental in managing OpenAI's significant $13 billion partnership with Microsoft. In November 2023, amidst a period of leadership instability at OpenAI, she briefly served as the interim CEO. Throughout her time at OpenAI, Murati frequently engaged in public discourse regarding the potential and risks of AI, emphasizing the importance of aligning AI models with human intention and ensuring they serve humanity. Murati left OpenAI in September 2024 and founded Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025. ^{[1] [2] [8]}

Thinking Machines Lab

In February 2025, Mira Murati founded Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence research and product company. She established the company with a team of fellow OpenAI veterans, including co-founders John Schulman, Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng, Andrew Tulloch, and Luke Metz. ^{[3] [1] [9]}

Tinker Product Launch

In October 2025, Thinking Machines Lab launched its first product, a tool named Tinker. The product is designed to automate the process of creating custom frontier AI models, making advanced AI fine-tuning more accessible to researchers, developers, and businesses. The company's stated goal for Tinker is to empower more people to experiment with and conduct research on frontier AI systems. ^[9]

Tinker automates complex tasks such as managing GPU clusters and stabilizing large-scale training runs. It allows users to fine-tune open-source models, initially supporting Meta’s Llama and Alibaba’s Qwen, through methods like supervised learning and reinforcement learning. Upon launch, the company began allowing users to apply for access to the Tinker API, which was initially offered for free. Murati expressed hope that making these tools more widely available would help reverse the trend of leading AI models becoming increasingly closed and proprietary. ^[9]

Funding and Valuation

In July 2025, Thinking Machines Lab secured a historic $2 billion in seed funding, valuing the company at $12 billion. This marked the largest seed financing round in venture capital history. The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with additional investment from prominent investors including Accel, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Nvidia, Cisco, ServiceNow, and Jane Street. The Albanian government was also an early investor, contributing €8.8 million to the startup. ^{[4] [1] [5] [8]}

Team and Recruitment

The team at Thinking Machines Lab comprises experienced scientists, engineers, and builders who have contributed to widely used AI products and open-source projects. These include ChatGPT, Character.ai, open-weights models like Mistral, and popular open-source projects such as PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq, and Segment Anything. ^[3]

The company has attracted significant attention for its talent, offering highly competitive compensation to secure top AI professionals. Federal hiring data from the first quarter of 2025 showed Thinking Machines Lab paying technical staff base salaries ranging from $450,000 to $500,000. These figures do not include additional lucrative sign-on bonuses and equity awards, which are often substantial in the highly competitive AI talent market, with total compensation packages for top talent in the field reportedly reaching up to $1 million or more. ^[7] In July 2025, Meta's Superintelligence Labs reportedly approached more than a dozen staffers at Thinking Machines Lab, with one individual receiving an offer exceeding $1 billion to join Meta. ^[6]