Mira Murati

Mira Murati is an Albanian-American technology executive and engineer, born in Vlorë, Albania, in 1988. She is the founder and chief executive officer of Thinking Machines Lab, the artificial intelligence research and product company she launched publicly in February 2025, and was previously chief technology officer of OpenAI, where she oversaw the development of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Sora. As of May 2026, she leads Thinking Machines Lab following its July 2025 seed round of approximately $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation, the largest seed round in venture-capital history at the time, and is named on the TIME 100 AI lists for both 2023 and 2024.

At a glance

• Education: International Baccalaureate, Pearson College UWC (Vancouver Island, Canada), 2007; Bachelor of Arts, Colby College (2011); Bachelor of Engineering in mechanical engineering, Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College (2012); honorary Doctor of Science, Dartmouth College (2024).
• Current role: Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Thinking Machines Lab, since 2024.
• Key contributions: Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI (2022 to 2024); product and research leadership for ChatGPT, DALL-E, GPT-4, and Sora; interim Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI during the November 2023 board crisis; founder of Thinking Machines Lab.
• X / Twitter: @miramurati
• Wikipedia: Mira Murati

Origins

Murati was born on December 16, 1988, in Vlorë, a port city on the Albanian coast, and spent her early childhood in post-communist Albania. As a teenager she was awarded a United World Colleges scholarship to attend Pearson College UWC on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, completing the International Baccalaureate in 2007. The two-year residential program is consistently cited in coverage as the formative international experience that took her from Albania to North America.

After Pearson, Murati enrolled at Colby College in Maine, then transferred to Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering under a dual-degree arrangement, completing a Bachelor of Arts at Colby in 2011 and a Bachelor of Engineering in mechanical engineering at Dartmouth in 2012. Dartmouth awarded her an honorary Doctor of Science in June 2024.

Career

Murati's professional path moved from finance through hardware engineering and product management before arriving at industrial AI. In summer 2011, between Colby and Dartmouth, she worked as a summer analyst at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo. After completing the Dartmouth engineering degree in 2012, she joined Zodiac Aerospace in France for a brief tenure on aerospace systems engineering.

In 2013 she joined Tesla in California, where she spent approximately three years as a senior product manager on the Model X program through its 2015 launch. The Tesla period coincided with the company's ramp from a single-product Model S manufacturer into a multi-product automaker. In 2016 she moved to Leap Motion (later renamed Ultraleap), the augmented-reality and gesture-control company, as Vice President of Product and Engineering, before transitioning to AI research two years later.

In 2018 Murati joined OpenAI, then a non-profit AI research laboratory, as Vice President of Applied AI and Partnerships. Over the next four years she rose through the company's senior-leadership ranks, with responsibility expanding to cover research, product, partnerships, and safety functions. In May 2022 she was promoted to Chief Technology Officer. As CTO she oversaw the launches of ChatGPT in November 2022, GPT-4 in March 2023, the DALL-E image-generation model line, and Sora in February 2024. ChatGPT in particular is widely identified in industry coverage as the consumer product that triggered the 2023 generative-AI boom.

In November 2023, Murati was named interim Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI after the board removed Sam Altman. Her tenure in that role lasted three days, from November 17 to November 20, 2023, before the board appointed former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear as a second interim chief executive. Altman was reinstated on November 22 and Murati returned to her CTO role. Reports during and after the episode placed her among the OpenAI executives advocating internally for Altman's return, though she has spoken publicly about the events only in limited terms.

On September 25, 2024, Murati announced her departure from OpenAI in a post on X, citing a desire "to create time and space to do my own exploration." Her departure came alongside Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and Vice President of Research Barret Zoph, both of whom would later join her at Thinking Machines Lab. In February 2025 she announced the public launch of Thinking Machines Lab with an initial team of approximately thirty researchers and engineers and a stated mission to make AI "more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable." In July 2025 the company closed an approximately $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion post-money valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from NVIDIA, AMD, Cisco, Accel, ServiceNow, Jane Street, and a $10 million strategic investment from the government of Albania. The round was reported as the largest seed round in venture-capital history. The company released its first product, Tinker, a fine-tuning platform for developers, in October 2025.

Affiliations

• Goldman Sachs: Summer Analyst, summer 2011 (Tokyo).
• Zodiac Aerospace: Engineering, 2012 to 2013.
• Tesla: Senior Product Manager (Model X), 2013 to 2016.
• Leap Motion / Ultraleap: Vice President of Product and Engineering, 2016 to 2018.
• OpenAI: Vice President of Applied AI and Partnerships, then Senior Vice President of Research, Product and Partnerships, 2018 to 2022.
• OpenAI: Chief Technology Officer, 2022-05 to 2024-09.
• OpenAI: Interim Chief Executive Officer, 2023-11-17 to 2023-11-20.
• Thinking Machines Lab: Founder and Chief Executive Officer, 2024 to present.

Notable contributions

Murati's body of public work is concentrated on the product, research-leadership, and operating side of frontier AI rather than on individual research authorship. The notable contributions track that emphasis.

• ChatGPT launch (November 2022). Murati was Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI when ChatGPT was released as a research preview, and led the research, product, and safety teams responsible for the consumer-facing product that became one of the fastest-adopted software applications in history.
• GPT-4 (March 2023). The successor large-language-model release that established multimodal text-and-image capability as a frontier-tier feature. Murati was the principal external spokesperson for the model, including the TIME interview in February 2023 in which she argued for AI regulation.
• DALL-E (2021 to 2023). The OpenAI image-generation model line, including DALL-E, DALL-E 2, and DALL-E 3.
• Sora (February 2024). OpenAI's text-to-video model. Her WSJ interview on Sora, including the on-camera exchange about training-data sources, was widely cited in subsequent coverage.
• OpenAI interim chief executive (November 17 to November 20, 2023). Stepped into the chief-executive role for three days during the OpenAI board crisis. After Altman's return on November 22 she resumed her CTO role.
• Thinking Machines Lab (2024 to present). Founded the AI research and product company in late 2024; raised approximately $2 billion in seed funding at a $12 billion valuation in July 2025; released the Tinker fine-tuning platform in October 2025; in March 2026 announced a long-term gigawatt-scale partnership with NVIDIA.
• TIME 100 AI (2023 and 2024) and TIME 100 Next (2023). Named to TIME's annual list of the most influential people in AI in both 2023 and 2024, with citations from Microsoft chairman Satya Nadella in the 2023 entry.
• Public-speaking record. Frequent presence on AI policy and capability discussions, including WSJ Tech Live in October 2023, World Economic Forum panels at Davos, the Hopkins Bloomberg Center Discovery Series interview with Kara Swisher, and the Dartmouth Engineering "AI Everywhere" conversation in June 2024.

Investments and boards

• Thinking Machines Lab (AI): Founder and Chief Executive Officer, 2024 to present. Public benefit corporation. Approximately $2 billion seed funding at a $12 billion valuation in July 2025, led by Andreessen Horowitz with NVIDIA, AMD, Cisco, Accel, ServiceNow, Jane Street, and a $10 million strategic investment from the government of Albania. Reported in November 2025 to be raising a follow-on at a $50 billion valuation.

No public personal angel-investor activity on record in AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, or energy as of May 2026. Murati's footprint in this section is concentrated in her founding and operating role at Thinking Machines Lab.

Network

Murati's most consequential professional relationship is with Sam Altman, the OpenAI chief executive she worked alongside from 2018 through 2024 and whom she briefly succeeded as interim chief executive during the November 2023 board episode. The two appeared jointly at the WSJ Tech Live 2023 interview shortly before the board crisis.

Her co-leadership cohort at OpenAI included Greg Brockman, the company's president; Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist and co-founder who was central to the November 2023 board action; and Andrej Karpathy, the founding research scientist who left OpenAI in early 2023.

At Thinking Machines Lab, the founding cohort is concentrated in former OpenAI senior staff. John Schulman, the OpenAI co-founder who had moved to Anthropic in 2024, departed Anthropic to join Thinking Machines as Chief Scientist. Barret Zoph, formerly OpenAI's Vice President of Research, joined as a co-founder. Lilian Weng, formerly OpenAI's Vice President of Safety Systems, also joined as a co-founder. Bob McGrew, formerly OpenAI's Chief Research Officer, advises. Outside Thinking Machines, she shares the OpenAI alumni-and-rivals universe with Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic, with Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind on the frontier-research circuit, and with Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei Li on the broader AI public-policy circuit.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Murati is one of the few women to lead a frontier-tier AI lab, alongside Daniela Amodei in the president role at Anthropic and Lila Ibrahim as chief operating officer of Google DeepMind. She is the only one of the three to be the founder of her current company. Industry coverage has identified her as the public face of the post-OpenAI senior-departure cohort that left in 2024 to found or lead competing labs.

Thinking Machines Lab's positioning is structurally distinctive. The company raised the largest seed round in venture-capital history, recruited a substantial fraction of OpenAI's senior research and product talent, and secured strategic-compute relationships with both NVIDIA and Google before publicly releasing a model. The combination places the company in a category closer to an established Frontier lab than to a typical Insurgent. The Tinker fine-tuning platform, released in October 2025, is a tooling product rather than a flagship model; the case for the valuation rests on the founding team's reputation and the public commitments to in-house models in 2026.

The November 2023 OpenAI board crisis is a defining episode in her public record. The three-day interim-CEO tenure made her the operating face of a governance episode that drew sustained national press coverage, and the Thinking Machines launch ten months later can be read as a continuation of the realignment that followed.

Outlook

Open questions over the next 6 to 18 months:

• First Thinking Machines model release. John Schulman has publicly stated 2026 as the release year for an in-house model. The capability profile, technical direction, and commercial positioning of the first model are the central unknowns for the company and for Murati's public record.
• Reported $50 billion follow-on round. Whether the November 2025 reports of a $50 billion-valuation negotiation convert into a closed round, hold steady, or move toward an alternative funding structure.
• Senior-talent recruitment. Continued movement of senior research, product, and engineering staff from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta into Thinking Machines, including any reciprocal departures back to those labs.
• Compute partnerships. Execution of the March 2026 NVIDIA gigawatt-scale Vera Rubin commitment and any further development of the deepened Google relationship reported by TechCrunch in April 2026.
• Tinker adoption and commercial trajectory. The growth of the fine-tuning platform's developer base and any expansion into adjacent commercial offerings.
• Public-policy posture. Murati's profile in US and international AI-policy discussions, where she has been a less-frequent voice than peers at Anthropic and OpenAI but is the senior face of a fast-growing private lab with international funding ties.

Sources

• Mira Murati. Wikipedia biographical entry covering her education, career, and the OpenAI and Thinking Machines Lab periods.
• Thinking Machines Lab. Company site with the Tinker product page, news announcements, and the Connectionism research blog.
• Thinking Machines Lab and NVIDIA Announce Long-Term Gigawatt-Scale Strategic Partnership. The March 10, 2026 strategic-partnership announcement.
• Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is worth $12B in seed round. TechCrunch coverage of the July 2025 seed round.
• Mira Murati Is on the TIME100 Next 2023 List. TIME 100 Next 2023 entry with citation by Satya Nadella.
• Mira Murati: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2024. TIME 100 AI 2024 entry.
• Mira Murati, Creator of ChatGPT, Thinks AI Should Be Regulated. TIME interview, February 2023, on AI regulation.
• OpenAI announces leadership transition. OpenAI's November 17, 2023 announcement of Sam Altman's removal and Murati's interim CEO appointment.
• Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI. Wikipedia entry on the November 2023 board episode and timeline.
• Top OpenAI executive Mira Murati leaves company. Washington Post coverage of the September 2024 OpenAI departure.
• OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Th'12 Shares Optimism for AI's Future. Dartmouth Engineering report on the June 2024 "AI Everywhere" conversation and the honorary degree.
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and CTO Mira Murati on the Future of AI and ChatGPT. WSJ Tech Live, October 2023, joint interview shortly before the November 2023 board crisis.
• OpenAI's Sora Made Me Crazy AI Videos. WSJ interview with Murati on the Sora text-to-video model, February 2024.
• Feature image: locally-generated text card. As of May 2026 the English Wikipedia article for Murati carries an "article needs images" notice and the only Wikimedia Commons file (File:Mira Murati.jpg) is nominated for deletion over a Getty Images source claim, so a placeholder card was used in lieu of a copyrighted press photo.