Who Is Mira Murati, CEO of Thinking Machines Lab?

Mira Murati is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence research company she established in February 2025 after serving as chief technology officer of OpenAI.

At Layer3Labs, we build and deploy AI workflows for business teams, so we evaluate how foundation model leadership and open-weights tooling affect real production systems.

Before launching Thinking Machines Lab and its open-weights model Inkling, Murati spent over six years at OpenAI guiding products including ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Sora.

What Mira Murati Is Doing Now

Thinking Machines Lab is a public benefit corporation, and its first product was Tinker, an API for fine-tuning models that launched in October 2025.

In July 2026, Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling, its first foundation model, a 975-billion-parameter model with open weights that can be fine-tuned on Tinker.

The company closed a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation in July 2025, as reported by TechCrunch. Murati is also on our list of AI people to watch.

• Current role: Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Thinking Machines Lab
• Former leadership: Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI from May 2022 to September 2024
• Known for: Overseeing development of ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex, Sora, and Inkling
• Academic background: Bachelor of Arts from Colby College (2011) and Bachelor of Engineering from Dartmouth College (2012)
• In the news for: Releasing the open-weights Inkling model and securing a one-gigawatt compute agreement with Nvidia

Departure from OpenAI and Reasons for Exit

Mira Murati left her job as OpenAI's chief technology officer in September 2024. Her departure took place during a broader executive transition at OpenAI that included the resignations of Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and Vice President of Research Barret Zoph, as reported by Engadget.

In her public departure statement posted on X in September 2024, Murati addressed her motives directly. Murati wrote: "I'm stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration." She added: "My six-and-a-half years with the OpenAl team have been an extraordinary privilege."

Engadget reported that she had served as chief technology officer since 2018, but Wikipedia says she joined in 2018 as vice president of applied AI and partnerships and became chief technology officer in May 2022. TechCrunch called her an OpenAI co-founder in a March 2026 report, but she was not one.

Thinking Machines Lab and the Inkling Foundation Model

According to Wikipedia, Thinking Machines Lab aims "to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable."

Andreessen Horowitz led the July 2025 seed round, and TechCrunch named Accel, Nvidia, AMD and Jane Street among the other participants. In July 2026, Fortune reported, citing Bloomberg, that the company was said to have been in discussions about a bigger, subsequent round.

Fortune reported that Tinker is the company's revenue source and that its customers include hedge fund Bridgewater Associates. On March 10, 2026, Thinking Machines Lab announced a multi-year partnership with Nvidia to deploy at least one gigawatt of Vera Rubin systems starting in 2027, as reported by TechCrunch. Nvidia also made an undisclosed strategic investment. In a company blog post quoted by TechCrunch, Murati wrote: "This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own."

On July 15, 2026, Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling, its first foundation model, making full model weights accessible to the public, as reported by SiliconANGLE. Our Inkling explainer covers the model in more depth, and our guide on how to run Inkling locally covers self-hosting it.

• Inkling employs a mixture-of-experts architecture containing 975 billion total parameters, activating approximately 41 billion parameters per prompt.
• Training consumed approximately 45 trillion tokens across text, image, audio, and video inputs, producing text-only outputs.
• The engineering team trained the model on Nvidia GB300 NVL72 hardware in less than nine months.
• Thinking Machines Lab confirmed the model is not intended for direct monetization and stated that "it is not the strongest model available today, closed or open."
• Murati announced the launch on X, writing: "Our first model, Inkling. Trained from scratch, weights are open, fine-tunable on Tinker today."
• Murati told Bloomberg in June 2026, as quoted by Fortune: "Interaction models are able to capture all of these nuances."

Leadership Departures and Executive Reorganization

Thinking Machines Lab experienced multiple executive transitions within twelve months of its launch, resulting in the departure of three co-founders. Murati co-founded the company in February 2025 with Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, among others, and OpenAI co-founder John Schulman joined as chief scientist at launch, as documented by TechCrunch.

On January 14, 2026, Murati announced the departure of co-founder and CTO Barret Zoph, writing, "We have parted ways with Barret Zoph," while announcing that Soumith Chintala would serve as the new chief technology officer of Thinking Machines Lab. TechCrunch reported that Zoph, co-founder Luke Metz, and Sam Schoenholz returned to OpenAI.

Co-founder Andrew Tulloch departed Thinking Machines Lab in October 2025 for a role at Meta, as reported in subsequent coverage by TechCrunch.

OpenAI Product Leadership and Model Deployments

At OpenAI, Murati led work on ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex and Sora, according to Wikipedia.

In November 2023, when OpenAI's board fired chief executive officer Sam Altman, Murati briefly assumed CEO duties and then returned to the CTO role, as reported by Engadget. In October 2023, Fortune ranked her 57th on its list of the 100 Most Powerful Women in Business, per Wikipedia.

Education and Early Career

Murati attended Colby College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2011, according to Wikipedia. Murati then earned a Bachelor of Engineering in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth College in 2012.

Murati joined Tesla in 2013 as a product manager on the Model X, according to Wikipedia.

From 2016 to 2018, she worked at Leap Motion before joining OpenAI. In June 2024, Dartmouth College awarded her an honorary Doctor of Science.

Mira Murati's Net Worth

No named outlet has published a net worth figure for Mira Murati as of October 2026.

Wikipedia cites a March 2025 Bloomberg report that put the average founder stake in Thinking Machines Lab at $1.4 billion. That figure is an average across the founders and does not measure Murati's own net worth.