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Mira Murati, founder of AI startup Thinking Machines and former chief technology officer of OpenAI, today announced a new round of $2 billion in venture funding, and stated that her company’s first product will launch in the coming months and will include a “significant open source component…useful for researchers and startups developing custom models.”
The news is exciting for all those awaiting Murati’s new venture since she exited OpenAI in September 2024 as part of a wave of high-profile researcher and leadership departures, and seems to come at an opportune time given her former employer OpenAI’s recent announcement that its own forthcoming open source frontier AI model — still unnamed — would be delayed.
As Murati wrote on X:
“Thinking Machines Lab exists to empower humanity through advancing collaborative general intelligence. We’re building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world – through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate. We’re excited that in the next couple months we’ll be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models. Soon, we’ll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems. To accelerate our progress, we’re happy to confirm that we’ve raised $2B led by a16z with participation from NVIDIA, Accel, ServiceNow, CISCO, AMD, Jane Street and more who share our mission. We’re always looking for extraordinary talent that learns by doing, turning research into useful things. We believe AI should serve as an extension of individual agency and, in the spirit of freedom, be distributed as widely and equitably as possible. We hope this vision resonates with those who share our commitment to advancing the field. If so, join us. https://thinkingmachines.paperform.co“
Broad excitement from Thinking Machines team
Other Thinking Machines employees have echoed the excitement around the product and infrastructure progress.
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Alexander Kirillov described it on X as “the most ambitious multimodal AI program in the world,” noting rapid progress over the past six months.
Horace He, another engineer at the company, highlighted their early work on scalable, efficient tooling for AI researchers. “We’re building some of the best research infra around,” he posted. “Research infra is about jointly optimizing researcher and GPU efficiency, and it’s been a joy to work on this with the other great folk here.”
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