Mira Murati
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Ermira "Mira" Murati (born December 16, 1988) is an Albanian-American engineer and technology executive best known for serving as the Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI from May 2022 until September 2024, and for founding the artificial intelligence startup Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025.[1] At OpenAI, Murati oversaw the development and public release of products including ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex and Sora, and she briefly served as the company's interim chief executive officer during the board crisis of November 2023 that temporarily removed Sam Altman.[1][2] In July 2025, Thinking Machines Lab raised approximately $2 billion in seed funding at a $12 billion valuation, one of the largest seed rounds in venture capital history, and in October 2025 the company released its first product, an API for fine-tuning open-weight language models called Tinker.[3][4]
Mira Murati was born on December 16, 1988 in Vlorë, a port city on the southwestern coast of Albania.[1][5] She grew up during the final years of Albania's communist era and the subsequent transition to a market economy. According to Wikipedia, her parents were both engineers: her father worked as a civil engineer and her mother as an electrical engineer.[1]
At age 16, Murati was awarded a United World Colleges scholarship and traveled to Canada to attend Pearson College UWC on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.[1] She graduated from Pearson College in 2007 with an International Baccalaureate diploma.[1] The UWC program, which brings together students from around the world for the final two years of pre-university study, is widely regarded as a launching pad for academically talented students from developing countries.
After Pearson, Murati enrolled in a dual-degree engineering program offered jointly by Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering in Hanover, New Hampshire.[1][6] She received a Bachelor of Arts from Colby College in 2011 and a Bachelor of Engineering degree in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering in 2012.[1][6] At Dartmouth she participated in Dartmouth Formula Racing, the engineering school's student-built race car program.[6]
In June 2024, Dartmouth College awarded Murati an honorary Doctor of Science degree, citing her work to "democratize technology and advance a better, safer world."[1][6]
While still a student, Murati interned during the summer of 2011 as a summer analyst at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, Japan.[1][5] After completing her engineering degree at Dartmouth in 2012, she joined the French aerospace company Zodiac Aerospace as an advanced concepts engineer, a position she held briefly from 2012 to 2013.[1][5]
In 2013, Murati joined Tesla, Inc. as a senior product manager working on the Model X, the company's electric SUV that was then in development.[1][5] She remained at Tesla until 2016, during the period when the Model X was finalized and brought to market and when Tesla began deploying its early Autopilot driver-assistance system.[1][7] In subsequent interviews she has described her time at Tesla as a formative experience in shipping ambitious hardware on aggressive timelines.[5]
After Tesla, Murati moved to Leap Motion, an augmented and virtual reality startup based in San Francisco that specialized in hand-tracking and gesture-recognition technology. She joined in 2016 as vice president of product and engineering and remained until 2018.[1][5][8] Leap Motion was later acquired by the British haptics company Ultraleap. Murati's role at Leap Motion deepened her hands-on experience with human-computer interaction and immersive interfaces, areas she would later cite as influences on her thinking about how people interact with AI systems.[8]
Murati joined OpenAI in June 2018 as vice president of applied AI and partnerships.[1][7] At the time, OpenAI was still primarily a research laboratory and had only recently begun commercializing its work. Over the following years she took on progressively broader responsibilities. In 2020 she became senior vice president of research, product, and partnerships, and in May 2022 she was promoted to Chief Technology Officer.[1][5]
As CTO, Murati oversaw OpenAI's research, product, and safety teams, and she became one of the most visible executive faces of the company alongside chief executive officer Sam Altman and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.[1][9]
Murati led OpenAI's product organization during what is widely regarded as the most consequential period of public AI deployment in the company's history. Under her tenure as CTO, OpenAI released:
In a March 2023 interview with the Associated Press and other outlets following the release of GPT-4, Murati became one of the first major AI executives to publicly call for government regulation of advanced AI systems, saying that AI "needs to be regulated."[7] In a follow-up interview with TIME, she elaborated that responsibility for safety could not rest with technology companies alone, and that governments, regulators, civil society and international institutions all needed to be involved in shaping how powerful AI systems are deployed.[27]
Murati was also a central figure in OpenAI's public communication strategy during this period. She led the company's product keynotes, gave media interviews on behalf of OpenAI in the wake of major model releases, and represented the company at industry conferences and academic events including talks at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center.[6][27]
On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board of directors abruptly removed Sam Altman as chief executive officer and announced that Murati would serve as interim CEO of the company.[2][13] The board's statement said Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board," but did not provide further details. The decision triggered what has since been called "the OpenAI blip," a five-day period in which the future of one of the world's most prominent AI companies was in doubt.[2][13]
Murati's tenure as interim CEO was short. On November 19, 2023, OpenAI announced that Emmett Shear, co-founder of Twitch, would replace her as interim CEO while the board searched for a permanent successor.[14] During the same period, more than 700 of OpenAI's roughly 770 employees signed an open letter threatening to resign and follow Altman to a new role at Microsoft unless the board reversed its decision and resigned.[14] Murati was among the signatories of the staff letter, publicly siding with Altman's reinstatement despite having briefly held the chief executive role.[14]
On November 21, 2023, OpenAI announced that Altman would return as chief executive officer, the board would be reconstituted, and Murati would resume her role as CTO.[14][15]
On September 25, 2024, Murati announced her departure from OpenAI in a public message posted to X (formerly Twitter). She wrote that she was "stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration."[16][17] Her departure was announced on the same day that two other senior OpenAI executives, chief research officer Bob McGrew and vice president of research Barret Zoph, also announced they would leave the company.[16][17] The simultaneous departures were widely reported as part of an extended pattern of senior executive turnover at OpenAI that had begun with the November 2023 board crisis and continued through 2024.[17]
In total, Murati spent approximately six and a half years at OpenAI, an unusually long tenure for a senior technical executive in the fast-moving frontier AI industry.[16] During that period she went from a vice president responsible for partnerships and applied AI to the company's chief technology officer and, briefly, its acting chief executive, in parallel with OpenAI's transformation from a research nonprofit into a capped-profit organization with multibillion-dollar revenues and global brand recognition.[9][17]
On February 18, 2025, Murati publicly announced the launch of a new artificial intelligence company called Thinking Machines Lab.[3][18] The company was incorporated as a public benefit corporation and is headquartered in San Francisco.[3]
In a blog post announcing the company, Murati and her co-founders said Thinking Machines Lab's mission was to "make AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable."[3][18] The team's initial focus areas were stated as building multimodal AI systems that "work with people collaboratively," developing frontier models in fields including science and programming, and contributing to AI safety through open research and the publication of code, datasets, and model specifications.[18]
The founding leadership team included a number of high-profile researchers and engineers drawn primarily from OpenAI:
According to the company's announcement, the initial team consisted of about 30 researchers and engineers, drawn from OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, Character.AI and Mistral AI.[18]
By mid-2025, Thinking Machines Lab had become one of the most closely watched AI startups in the world, despite having released no products. In July 2025, the company closed an approximately $2 billion seed funding round at a valuation of about $12 billion.[4][21] The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, and Jane Street.[4][21] Trade press described the round as one of the largest seed rounds in venture capital history.[21]
The funding raised by Thinking Machines Lab attracted attention not only for its size but also for what it implied about market expectations around the founding team, since the company had not yet released a product or detailed its technical roadmap at the time the round closed.[4][21]
In September 2025, Thinking Machines Lab launched a public research blog called Connectionism. The inaugural post, titled "Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference," analyzed why large language models often return different outputs for the same prompt even at temperature zero, and identified variability in batch size, rather than floating-point arithmetic alone, as a primary cause.[22] Murati posted on X that the blog was part of the company's mission to "improve people's scientific understanding of AI and work with the broader research community."[22]
On October 1, 2025, Thinking Machines Lab released its first product, an API for fine-tuning open-weight language models called Tinker.[23][24] Tinker is designed for researchers and developers who want to fine-tune large open-weight models without managing the underlying distributed training infrastructure. The service supports a range of open-weight models, from compact models such as Llama-3.2-1B to large mixture-of-experts models, and exposes low-level primitives (named forward_backward and sample) that allow users to express custom post-training procedures including supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.[23][24]
The Tinker service uses LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) to reduce the cost of fine-tuning by sharing compute resources across training jobs.[23] Thinking Machines Lab also released an open-source companion library, the Tinker Cookbook, containing modern post-training implementations.[23] Early users cited by the company included researchers at Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley and Redwood Research who applied the tool to tasks including theorem proving, chemistry reasoning and reinforcement learning experiments.[23]
Tinker was launched as a private beta with free access, with the company indicating that usage-based pricing would be introduced subsequently.[23][24]
The size and prominence of the Thinking Machines Lab team made it a target for talent recruitment by other AI companies. Industry reporting in August 2025 indicated that Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms had approached several Thinking Machines Lab employees with extremely large compensation offers as part of Meta's broader recruitment push for its Superintelligence Labs initiative; both Murati and co-founder Andrew Tulloch reportedly declined personal offers from Meta.[25] According to Business Standard, the offer reportedly extended to Tulloch was structured as a compensation package worth up to $1.5 billion over six years, a figure Meta later disputed as inaccurate.[19] The episode underscored both the financial scale that AI talent competition had reached by 2025 and the perceived strategic value of the Thinking Machines team to potential acquirers and competitors.[19][25]
Murati has been featured on multiple lists of influential figures in technology. In October 2023, she was ranked 57th on Fortune's annual list of "The 100 Most Powerful Women in Business."[1] In 2023 she was named to the TIME100 Next list, the magazine's catalog of rising leaders, and in 2024 she was named to the TIME100 AI list, which recognizes the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence.[1][26] In June 2024, Dartmouth College presented her with an honorary Doctor of Science degree at its commencement ceremony, with the citation describing her as someone who had "democratized technology and advanced a better, safer world for us all."[1][6]
In public talks, congressional discussions and interviews, Murati has consistently argued that powerful AI systems should be deployed openly to the public so that society can observe their effects and develop appropriate norms and regulations, while also calling on governments to regulate frontier AI development.[7][9][27] In a widely cited February 2023 TIME interview around the launch of ChatGPT, she stated that AI "should be regulated," at a time when most major technology companies were still publicly resistant to specific regulatory proposals.[27] She has frequently emphasized the importance of safety research and the role of AI labs in collaborating with external researchers, governments, and civil society on the responsible development of advanced AI.[7][9][27]
Murati is also a published author. In the spring 2022 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Murati contributed an essay on "Language & Coding Creativity," discussing the role of large language models in creative work and software development.[1]
In a 2024 Fortune profile, the magazine described her as one of a small number of executives who had been "instrumental in scaling OpenAI from a research organization to one of the most important AI companies in the world," and noted her transition from product manager at Tesla to chief technology officer of OpenAI within about a decade.[5][9]
She is fluent in Albanian, English and Italian, with the Italian-language ability featuring prominently during her live demonstration of GPT-4o's real-time translation capabilities at the May 2024 OpenAI Spring Update event.[1][11]
Murati's career has made her one of the most prominent women in artificial intelligence and a recognizable face for the rapid public deployment of generative AI systems from 2022 to 2024. As CTO of OpenAI during the launches of ChatGPT, GPT-4 and GPT-4o, she presided over a period in which the commercial and cultural footprint of large language models expanded dramatically. Her decision to leave OpenAI in September 2024 and found Thinking Machines Lab, and the subsequent $2 billion seed round closed in July 2025, have been widely cited as evidence of a broader trend of senior researchers and executives leaving incumbent AI labs to start new, frontier-scale companies.[4][17][21]
The continued evolution of Thinking Machines Lab, including subsequent product releases following Tinker and the company's research publications under the Connectionism series, has positioned Murati as one of the most closely watched founders in artificial intelligence.[22][23] Her trajectory, from a mechanical engineering student building race cars at Dartmouth, to a product manager on Tesla's Model X, to chief technology officer of the company that brought generative AI into mainstream use, and finally to the founder of a frontier AI startup valued at $12 billion within months of leaving stealth, has been cited in business and engineering media as a representative case study of how the AI industry's leadership has been formed at the intersection of hardware engineering, consumer product development, and large-scale machine learning research.[5][6][9][21]
Murati's role during the November 2023 OpenAI board crisis, in particular, drew sustained scrutiny from journalists and historians of the AI industry, given that she became the first woman to lead OpenAI even on an interim basis, and given that her decision to publicly support Altman's reinstatement was widely credited with helping to stabilize the company during the five-day "blip."[2][13][14][15] Subsequent reporting and litigation related to OpenAI's governance have continued to refer to her tenure as a pivotal episode in the company's history.[14][15][17]