Ex-OpenAI CTO’s Startup “Thinking Machines” Receives $2 Billion at $10 Billion Valuation

Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, has launched a new AI startup called “Thinking Machines.” The company is focused on creating smarter and more adaptable artificial intelligence systems.

Although Thinking Machines is still in stealth mode and hasn’t released any products, it has quickly attracted the attention of top investors. The startup recently received $2 billion in funding from firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Conviction Partners.

The company’s current valuation is $10 billion, which is unusually high for such a young business. Investors are placing their confidence in Mira Murati and her team of leading AI experts, hoping they will deliver major innovations in the field.

Mira Murati, formerly the Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI—the company that launched ChatGPT—has founded a new artificial intelligence company called Thinking Machines Lab. While many new tech startups struggle for attention in their early days, Thinking Machines Lab stands out immediately for both its vision and the remarkable speed with which it has attracted funding. The purpose of this startup is not just to build another chatbot or a narrow AI tool, but to create general-purpose AI systems that can learn, reason, and perform a variety of tasks.

The company aims to make AI more understandable and easier for people to work with, focusing on technology that can be tailored and customized by users for different needs.

Ultimately, some believe the ambition is to move toward Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, which would mean creating AI that can adapt and learn almost anything a human can.

Despite being in its very early days, Thinking Machines Lab has already achieved what few companies have: it raised an astonishing $2 billion from investors, even before having a product to show the public. On the strength of its founding team and its bold vision, investors have valued the startup at $10 billion—a figure usually reserved for well-established tech giants.

A Closer Look at the Investors Behind the Company

The enormous funding round that propelled Thinking Machines Lab to a $10 billion valuation came from some of the most respected investment firms in the technology sector. Among the most prominent backers is Andreessen Horowitz, often referred to as a16z, a venture capital powerhouse in Silicon Valley known for early and transformative investments in companies such as Facebook, Airbnb, GitHub, and Coinbase. This firm specializes in finding the next era-defining technologies and often leads the way when it comes to bold investments in software, crypto, and now artificial intelligence. By leading this round, Andreessen Horowitz is showing that it sees Thinking Machines Lab as a likely contender to define the next chapter of AI.

Conviction Partners is another key investor, run by Sarah Guo. Her firm is known for supporting groundbreaking AI and deep technology companies, with a particular focus on startups that could dramatically change how humans and machines interact. Conviction Partners is respected for backing visionary founders early, and their involvement in Thinking Machines Lab shows they believe Mira Murati can fundamentally shift the landscape of AI. It’s also worth noting that other investment groups, including some tech billionaires and major global funds, were reportedly interested in participating. The company, however, set a high bar by only accepting investments of $50 million or more, ensuring that only the biggest players could get involved. These investors are not simply providing cash—they are placing their trust in Mira’s experience, her team’s extraordinary talent, and the belief that this startup could be a game-changer for the future of artificial intelligence.

The Ambition Behind the Technology

Although the company has not yet released a product, there are strong signals about its goals. Thinking Machines Lab intends to work on building AI systems that can quickly and easily learn new tasks and adapt to a variety of user needs. The technology they aim to develop is supposed to be more flexible and customizable than existing AI, so people or companies could shape it for their specific industry or individual workflows. There’s also talk that the company will focus on letting users have more control over how the AI behaves, which is a step beyond today’s “one-size-fits-all” chatbots.

Many in the tech world speculate that Thinking Machines Lab is working on foundational AI models—these are the core systems that can serve as a platform for all kinds of future apps, much like how OpenAI’s GPT models underpin countless chatbots, writing assistants, and other tools today. The goal appears to be not just smarter AI, but also safer, more useful, and adaptable systems that can function in real-world settings where requirements constantly change. While there is a lot of excitement about what Mira Murati and her team might reveal, for now the company is keeping its work highly secretive and has yet to announce any public demos or details.

Building an Elite Team of AI Researchers

From the beginning, Thinking Machines Lab has managed to attract some of the world’s best minds in artificial intelligence. Mira Murati has assembled a team of AI experts, many of whom worked alongside her at OpenAI and contributed to the breakthroughs that made tools like ChatGPT possible. This group includes John Schulman, who was a co-founder of OpenAI and is widely respected for his work in reinforcement learning, and Alec Radford, known for building core versions of the GPT models that have shaped the AI industry.

Other prominent names, such as Bob McGrew and Barrett Zoph, have joined the effort, creating a team that many would describe as a “dream team” of AI research and engineering. At this stage, the company consists of about 30 employees, but each brings an exceptional level of skill and knowledge to the table. The presence of such talent gives the startup instant credibility in the eyes of investors and peers alike, since this team has already demonstrated their ability to push the boundaries of AI research and build world-changing products.

Leadership and Decision-Making Power

Mira Murati is not only the founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, but she also holds a unique degree of control over the company’s future. The company’s structure gives her super-voting rights, meaning her vote on any company decision carries far more weight than that of any other shareholder or board member. In practice, her voting rights can be up to one hundred times more powerful than a regular investor’s.

This arrangement is becoming more common among top-tier tech startups, particularly those where investors want to empower visionary founders to take bold risks and move quickly. By giving Mira such authority, the backers are showing an extraordinary level of confidence in her leadership. They believe that the best way to achieve breakthrough innovation is to let the founder pursue her vision with minimal interference from outside parties.

Why This Story Matters in the Tech Industry

The rapid rise of Thinking Machines Lab has captured the attention of the technology world for several reasons. Raising $2 billion before even announcing a product is extremely rare, and signals an incredible amount of trust in Mira Murati’s reputation. Her work at OpenAI—where she played a crucial role in building technologies like ChatGPT and DALL·E—has convinced many that she is among the few people capable of leading the next generation of artificial intelligence.

The willingness of major investors to provide so much funding so early is part of a new trend in the AI industry: the race to find and back teams that could build the next big leap in AI capabilities. If Thinking Machines Lab is successful, it could influence the direction of AI for years to come, just as OpenAI’s breakthroughs changed the market a few years ago. For investors, being first to support this kind of talent and vision could bring enormous rewards.

A Closer Look at the Risks and Challenges

While the excitement around Thinking Machines Lab is clear, there are also some very real reasons for caution. For one, the company remains highly secretive and has yet to release even a demonstration of what it’s working on. A $10 billion valuation, with no product or customer, is extremely high by any standard and sets a high bar for what the company needs to deliver.

Some in the tech industry worry that the wave of huge investments in AI could be forming a bubble, where so much money is poured into early-stage ideas that many may never pay off. There is also the challenge of maintaining trust: as the months go by, investors, partners, and the public will all want to see progress. It remains to be seen whether the company’s early promise will lead to real breakthroughs, or if the hype will outpace what is actually delivered.

The Current State of Play

Thinking Machines Lab, under Mira Murati’s leadership, is an early-stage AI startup with the goal of making artificial intelligence more powerful, more adaptable, and easier for people to work with. Despite being only a few months old and still operating in secrecy, the company has secured an extraordinary amount of funding from top-tier investors. The core team is made up of world-class AI talent, and the company’s ambitions are nothing short of transformative for the AI field. For now, the world is watching to see if this extraordinary bet will turn into the next big leap for artificial intelligence—or if it’s simply a sign of how much hope and hype surrounds the future of AI today.

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