Mira Murati Makes Her Mark in San Francisco: A Closer Look at Thinking Machines Lab

Mira Murati isn’t a natural creature of the bustling conference stage. As the CTO of OpenAI, she was present but rarely in the limelight. Now, as CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, she has been even harder to find. However, when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday—her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months—it was definitely worth paying attention.

The timing makes sense. Thinking Machines has spent the better part of a year and a half operating largely in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers, and shipping one product, Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open source AI models. In that time, the companies competing for the same talent, customers, and headlines have only grown more omnipresent. OpenAI—where Murati spent six years, including two as CTO—is constantly in the news cycle, while Anthropic’s momentum is all that anyone can talk about right now. And xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture, has been folded into SpaceX ahead of its expected massive public offering, generating its own gravitational pull on attention and investment.

In that environment, staying heads down has diminishing returns; at some point, you have to make some noise just to remind the market you exist. Murati used her Bloomberg appearance to do exactly that and not much more. She previewed what Thinking Machines is calling “interaction models,” which she described as a fundamentally different kind of AI interface.

Unlike most AI products today, which operate in a turn-based, prompt-and-response dynamic, these models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals. The idea is that they can pick up on the texture of human communication—the interruptions, mid-thought corrections, even pauses to think—in something closer to real time.

Murati was careful to frame it as a first step, not a finished product, and she declined to put a specific release date on anything. She also answered questions about her chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO (inside OpenAI it came to be called “the blip.”) Murati said she felt clear about her decisions in each moment—protecting the mission and the team was the through-line that made the choices feel obvious even as the situation appeared to be falling apart from the outside. She acknowledged that clarity of intent is not the same thing as clarity about consequences, and in retrospect, she would have pushed harder for more information and an actual transition plan.

Murati also discussed the departures of several high-profile researchers from Thinking Machines in recent months, a subject she has largely avoided in public. First, she said building a frontier AI lab from scratch compresses years of normal organizational volatility into months. She also acknowledged that compensation—the nine-figure packages that have become standard currency in the war for AI talent—captures people’s imaginations but suggested it isn’t usually the whole story.

Chang also politely pressed her on the concentration of consequential decisions in too few hands—not just at OpenAI but across the industry. Murati expressed concern about the absence of structural checks, saying good people make bad calls and well-intentioned organizations drift. She suggested that too much attention has been paid to virtue and too little to governance.

Finally, Chang asked what comes next for AI broadly, including for the humans who once said would be empowered by AI but have more recently grown scared by talk of mass job displacement, not to mention a future where AI is used to create chemical weapons. Murati was measured in her response, pushing back on the framing of inevitable dystopia or inevitable utopia, arguing that neither outcome is predetermined and that the period we’re in right now will determine which way things go.