The AI startup of Mira Murati brings on board prominent advisors from former OpenAI.

Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI, is leading a new project in the field of artificial intelligence called Thinking Machines Lab, which has brought on two notable advisors: Bob McGrew, who previously served as the director of research at OpenAI, and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher involved in several significant innovations at the company. The Thinking Machines Lab website was discreetly updated in March to include the names of McGrew and Radford.

McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 as part of the technical team and was promoted to vice president of research in 2018, eventually taking on the role of director of research. He left the company in September 2024, citing his desire to take a “break.” Radford, on the other hand, departed OpenAI late last year to pursue independent research after nearly ten years with the organization, and he was the lead author of the influential paper on generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs). These models are the foundation of popular OpenAI products, such as the ChatGPT chatbot platform. Additionally, Radford contributed to the development of several models in the GPT series, as well as the Whisper speech recognition model and DALL-E, OpenAI's image generator.

So far, Thinking Machines Lab has been vague about its research agenda and product roadmap. However, in a statement released in February, the startup expressed its intention to develop tools that “make artificial intelligence work for the unique needs and goals of individuals” and to create AI systems that are “more understandable, customizable, and capable overall” than those currently available.

Murati is at the helm of Thinking Machines Lab as CEO, while John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI, serves as chief scientist, and Barret Zoph, who led model post-training at OpenAI, is the CTO. Murati left OpenAI last October after six years with the company, where she started as vice president of applied AI and partnerships and was promoted to CTO in 2022, leading work on ChatGPT, DALL-E, and the Codex code generation system, which powered the early versions of GitHub's Copilot programming assistant. It has been reported that Murati was in talks to raise over $100 million from unidentified venture capital firms for Thinking Machines Lab, which has a team of dozens of employees from prominent artificial intelligence laboratories, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind.