When all hell broke loose at OpenAI in November 2023 – during the bitter boardroom fight over the company’s future that saw Sam Altman briefly ousted – chief technology officer Mira Murati stepped in to hold up the tent. Now she has a gig of her own. Having “fled” OpenAI with a group of its top researchers, the Albanian-born whizz is the driving force behind Thinking Machines Lab, which has just pulled off “the largest seed funding round in history”, says Wired. The fledgling firm raised a record $2 billion, valuing it at $12 billion, in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and featuring a star-studded line-up of tech heavyweights including Nvidia, Accel, Cisco and AMD.
The buzz around the start-up, which promises its first product in the next few months, is yet more evidence of “the premium placed on top AI talent” as the “ultra-competitive race” to build advanced systems goes into overdrive. It also reflects the ongoing brain drain at OpenAI. In 2021, seven former researchers formed Anthropic, “now a major rival”. Murati, whose co-founder John Schulman helped build ChatGPT, plans a similar coup.
Thinking Machines Lab is developing a multimodal AI that will interact with humans “through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate”, she wrote in a post. At OpenAI, she was “often caught in the centre of internal conflict” over the shift to a more commercial focus. In her own laboratory, she may hope for a lucratively quieter life.
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Murati, 37, burst onto the scene in 2023 when she emerged as one of the “few trailblazing women in AI”, says Women in Tech. Yet she put in a long apprenticeship before that. Born in Albania in 1988, she moved to an international school in Canada on a scholarship at 16 – graduating from Dartmouth in 2012 with a degree in mechanical engineering. Murati later told Fortune that her two most formative experiences were growing up under a totalitarian communist regime in Albania – she credits “boredom” with helping to spark a curiosity for knowledge and a passion for tinkering with computers – and taking a job at Tesla after leaving college. It was there that she first developed an interest in AI, working on the carmaker’s early-stage autopilot function. Murati went on to lead product and engineering teams at Leap Motion before moving to OpenAI in 2018 to help launch Dall-E and ChatGPT.
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Murati has often spoken publicly about AI’s power as a tool and the dangers it might hold, says The Guardian. The challenge, she has said, is how to make sure models are “aligned with human intention and ultimately in the service of humanity”. Yet colleagues reckon that, while a formidable technologist, Murati’s biggest strength is team building and forging alliances. At OpenAI, she managed the key $13 billion partnership with Microsoft, whose CEO Satya Nadella is a fan of her “ability to assemble teams with technical expertise, commercial acumen and a deep appreciation for the importance of the mission”. As a result, he wrote in Time, “Mira has helped build some of the most exciting AI technologies we’ve ever seen”.
Renowned for guarding her private life – “even her family turned to ChatGPT for answers”, says MSN – the first question Murati’s mother asked the chatbot after its 2022 release was: “When will Mira get married?” Her sister, who was guiding their mother through the process, responded: “Mom, it is just artificial intelligence. It is not magic”. Periodically, there are reports of “a secret Tuscan wedding” where the bride looked stunning in Albanian national dress. What’s for certain is that Murati hasn’t forgotten her old country – nor it her, says The Recursive. One of the biggest early investors in Thinking Machines Lab was the Albanian government, which revised its state budget to find €8.8 million. In Tirana, “Murati is seen as a symbol of Albania’s potential on the world stage”.
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