Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of OpenAI, has announced her new startup, Thinking Machine Labs, which is focused on building AI systems that are more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable than those currently available. Murati, who left OpenAI last October, is heading up the new company as CEO, with OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as chief scientist and Barret Zoph, OpenAI's ex-chief research officer, as CTO.

Thinking Machine Labs, which came out of stealth mode today, aims to address the "key gaps" that remain in AI capabilities, despite their rapid advancement. According to the company's blog post, the scientific community's understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind their rapidly advancing capabilities, and knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and people's abilities to use AI effectively.

The startup plans to focus on building "multimodal" systems that work with people collaboratively and can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise, enabling a broader spectrum of applications. Thinking Machine Labs is also building models at the frontier of capabilities in domains like science and programming, which will ultimately unlock the most transformative applications and benefits, such as enabling novel scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs.

AI safety is another core tenet of Thinking Machine Labs' work. The company plans to contribute to safety by preventing misuse of the models it releases, sharing best practices and recipes for building safe AI systems with the industry, and supporting external research on alignment by sharing code, datasets, and model specifications. Murati and her team are committed to understanding how their systems create genuine value in the real world, rather than just optimizing existing metrics.

Murati's departure from OpenAI last October was a significant event in the AI community, and her new venture has been the subject of much speculation and rumor. Prior to leaving OpenAI, Murati led the company's work on ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Codex, which powered early versions of GitHub's Copilot programming assistant. She was also briefly OpenAI's interim CEO after CEO Sam Altman's abrupt firing.

According to reports, Murati has already poached around 10 employees from rivals such as OpenAI, Character AI, and Google DeepMind. The company's blog lists 29 employees, including Murati, and is currently hiring machine learning scientists and engineers, as well as a research program manager. Thinking Machine Labs is also reportedly in talks to raise over $100 million from unnamed VC firms.

Murati's new venture joins a growing list of former OpenAI execs launching startups, including rivals such as Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence and Anthropic. The launch of Thinking Machine Labs marks an exciting new chapter in the development of AI, and we can expect to see significant advancements and innovations from this talented team in the years to come.