Following on May 28's AI: "The $2B Mira Murati Mystery".
From Observer, June 9:
With $2 billion in funding and a bench of former OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic talent, Murati is building a new lab around more collaborative, multimodal A.I.
Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, left the A.I. giant in late 2024 to found her own startup, Thinking Machines Lab, and raised a staggering $2 billion in less than a year. In her first media interview since founding the startup, Murati revealed what she has been building: “interaction models,” or multimodal A.I. systems that process audio, text and video simultaneously and collaborate with humans in near real time, without waiting for prompts. “I have very high conviction that the way to continue building frontier A.I. systems is to [create] systems that are not just autonomously advancing and leaving civilization behind, but are more like a tandem bike,” she said onstage at Bloomberg Tech Summit last week.
“They’re continuously taking in audio, text, video, and continuously providing output,” Murati added, describing the model, called TML-Interaction-Small, which she plans to release publicly later this year.
Unlike many A.I. founders who climbed traditional computer science or venture capital ranks, Murati’s path is rooted in product management. She studied mechanical engineering at Dartmouth College, where she worked on building a hybrid race car. After graduating, she joined Tesla in 2013 as a product manager for the Model X. She later led product and engineering at augmented reality startup Leap Motion (now UltraLeap), focusing on motion-based human-computer interaction.
In 2018, Murati joined OpenAI as head of applied A.I. and partnerships, rising quickly to become chief technology officer. Over six years, she helped steer the deployment of some of the most influential A.I. products, including ChatGPT, DALL-E, and GPT-4....
....MUCH MORE
Other than all that, what's she ever done?
If interested see also:
November 2023 - More On Q* and Q-Learning
October 2024 - "OpenAI Executives Say AI Will Be Able to Do Any Job Within 10 Years"
August 2025 - "Thanks for Your $1 Billion Job Offer, Mark Zuckerberg. I’m Gonna Pass." (META)
She is one of the reasons we note re: SoftBank's all-in wager on OpenAI:
...Should SoftBank be unable to repay or refinance the debts it is taking on, the risk goes from theoretical to kaboom pretty fast and all the other daisy-chain financings get stress-tested in a real-world cascade.
And unfortunately chatbots in general and OpenAI/Sam Altman in particular may not be the future that Mr. Son seems to think....
And:
...Throw in the fact that OpenAI and their ChatGPT may not be the ultimate winner of this unprecedented build-out and there are reasons to be hyper-aware. Stay tuned.
