Mira Murati

Albanian-born American engineer, founder and chief executive of Thinking Machines LabThinking Machines Lab, prop. n.: Mira Murati's AI company, which she started in San Francisco in 2025 after serving as OpenAI's technology chief. It makes tools for customizing AI models and releases some models openly.. After studying engineering at Dartmouth and working on the Model X at Tesla and on hand-tracking technology at Leap Motion, she joined OpenAIOpenAI, prop. n.: The American company that makes ChatGPT and the GPT models. It began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and is now a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit foundation. in 2018 and, as chief technology officer from 2022, oversaw the development and launch of ChatGPTChatGPT, prop. n.: OpenAI's AI chatbot, released free to the public in November 2022, which answers questions, writes and converses in everyday language. Its sudden popularity began the current AI boom., the DALL·EDALL·E, prop. n.: OpenAI's pioneering series of image generators, named after the painter Salvador Dalí and the robot WALL·E, which showed in 2021–2023 that AI could draw almost anything described in words. image generators and GPT-4GPT-4, prop. n.: OpenAI's 2023 language model, a big step up from the one behind the first ChatGPT. It scored well on many professional and academic exams and could also read images.. When the board removed Sam AltmanSam Altman, prop. n.: An American entrepreneur who co-founded OpenAI and runs it; the company's 2022 release of ChatGPT turned him into one of the public faces of the AI era. in November 2023 she briefly served as interim chief executive (see OpenAI leadership crisis (2023)OpenAI leadership crisis (2023), n.: The five days in November 2023 when OpenAI's board fired chief executive Sam Altman, nearly all staff threatened to quit, and he returned with a new board.). She left OpenAI in September 2024 and in February 2025 founded Thinking Machines Lab with former OpenAI colleagues including John SchulmanJohn Schulman, prop. n.: An American AI researcher who invented widely used reinforcement-learning algorithms such as PPO, co-founded OpenAI, and led the post-training work behind ChatGPT.; it raised one of the largest seed rounds on record, launched Tinker (2025), a service for fine-tuningfine-tuning, n.: Taking an AI model that has already learned a lot and training it a little more on a smaller, focused set of examples so it gets better at one job or behaves a certain way. open-weight modelsopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private., released an open-weight model of its own (2026), and publishes research on topics such as making language-model inference reproducible (see nondeterminismnondeterminism, n.: The fact that an AI model can give different answers to exactly the same question, partly because it deliberately chooses words with some randomness and partly because of tiny computing differences.).