Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI, founds AI startup ‘Thinking Machines Lab’
Three OpenAI co-founders become rivals in separate companies
Sutskever, who led Altman’s ousting, founded SSI last year
[By Bang Sung-hoon, Edaily News] Mira Murati, who worked as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at OpenAI, has founded a new artificial intelligence (AI) startup. Not only is it in competition with her former company OpenAI, but it also includes another OpenAI co-founder, attracting significant attention.
On the 18th (local time), according to the Financial Times (FT) and others, Murati announced via a blog post that she has commenced operations of AI startup ‘Thinking Machines Lab’, headquartered in San Francisco, USA. Murati stated, “Our goal is to create AI systems that are more widely understood, customizable, and generally high-performing.”
Thinking Machines Lab launched with high expectations as it included John Schulman, an OpenAI co-founder, Jonathan Rahman, who was in charge of special projects at OpenAI, and Barrett Zoph, the former vice president and chief research officer at OpenAI.
Murati also worked more than six years at OpenAI and served as interim CEO when Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was ousted. At that time, she supported Altman’s return as CEO.
Murati has recruited numerous researchers and engineers with experience at Google, Meta, Mistral, Character AI, and plans to build models focusing on science and programming with them.
Thinking Machines Lab stated, “Scientific advancement is a collective effort,” and they “believe that collaborating with a broader community of researchers and developers can most effectively advance humanity’s understanding of AI.” They also mentioned plans to publish technical blogs, papers, and code as they believe sharing their work can benefit the public and improve their own research culture.
With this, all three co-founders of OpenAI are now in competitive relationships in different companies. Previously, another OpenAI co-founder, Ilya Sutskever, founded an AI startup ‘Safe Superintelligence’ (SSI) last June, which focuses on ‘safety’ as indicated by the company’s name.
Sutskever, who played a key role in Altman’s ousting due to the rapid commercialization of OpenAI, left the company after Altman’s return and reportedly received interest from Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla.
Similarly, Sutskever has recruited many talents from competitors, including Daniel Gross, former head of AI at Apple and OpenAI, and Daniel Levy, former OpenAI researcher. SSI raised $1 billion in investment funding just three months after its founding in September last year.