Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, has launched a rival artificial intelligence start-up focused on making the technology widely accessible.
Murati, 36, on Tuesday unveiled Thinking Machines Lab, a product and research organisation, which aims to make “AI systems more widely understood, customisable and generally capable”.
A blog post on its website said “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 San-Francisco based company has also poached senior former OpenAI employees, including co-founder John Schulman, Jonathan Lachman, former head of special projects, and Barret Zoph, former vice-president.
Murati, who temporarily served as chief executive of OpenAI during the failed coup against founder Sam Altman, has also hired researchers and engineers with experience at other competitors such as Google, Meta, Mistral and Character AI who will build models focused on science and programming.
“Scientific progress is a collective effort,” Thinking Machines Lab said. “We believe that we’ll most effectively advance humanity’s understanding of AI by collaborating with the wider community of researchers and builders.”
It added that it planned to publish technical blog posts, papers and code because it believed “sharing our work will not only benefit the public but also improve our own research culture”.
Murati had worked at OpenAI for more than six years, leading the company’s efforts to build ChatGPT as a standalone product and working on technical breakthroughs from the company’s large language models.
In November 2023, OpenAI’s directors appointed Murati as interim chief executive after removing Altman under claims he was not “sufficiently candid” with the board. Altman returned days later after protests from employees and investors.
Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI cofounder and chief scientist who was also involved in the coup attempt, has since left the company to launch a start-up called Safe Superintelligence. It raised $1bn in September to focus on developing safe AI systems that have human level or superior intelligence.