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Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati unveils Thinking Machines: A startup focused on multimodality, human-AI collaboration
The OpenAI rival will focus on strong infrastructure, multimodality and human-AI collaboration (as opposed to purely agentic systems).
Thinking Machine’s team of roughly two dozen engineers and scientists is stacked with other OpenAI alums — including co-founder and deep reinforcement learning pioneer John Schulman and ChatGPT co-creator Barret Zoph — which could position the startup to make significant strides in AI research and development. Thinking Machines — not to be mistaken with the now defunct supercomputer and AI firm of the 1980s — isn’t yet offering specific examples of intended projects, but suggests a broad focus on multimodal capabilities, human-AI collaboration (as opposed to purely agentic systems) and strong infrastructure. Murati abruptly resigned from OpenAI in September 2024 — following the unexpected departure of other execs including Schulman and co-founder former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever — after joining the company in 2018 and ascending to CTO in 2022 (the year that brought us the groundbreaking ChatGPT).
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