Mira Murati, Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, speaks during The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live Conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 17, 2023.
Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images
Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, said Tuesday that her artificial intelligence startup Thinking Machines Lab has raised $2 billion in fresh capital and will announce its first product “in the next couple months.”
Murati rocketed into the spotlight in 2023 when she was named interim CEO of OpenAI after Sam Altman was briefly ousted by the company’s board.
She left OpenAI in September and launched Thinking Machines in February, though she has not shared many details about the startup publicly.
In her first post on X since February, Murati said Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z led Thinking Machines’ funding round. Additional investors included Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Accel, ServiceNow, CISCO and Jane Street.
“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,” Murati wrote. “We hope this vision resonates with those who share our commitment to advancing the field.”
Murati said Thinking Machines is building multimodal AI that will be compatible with the ways that people naturally interact with the world, including through conversation and sight.
The company’s first product will include an open source component for researchers and other startups, she added.
“Soon, we’ll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems,” Murati said.
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