The artificial intelligence landscape continues to shift as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati builds out her ambitious new AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab. The company has recently added two heavyweight names to its advisory ranks: Bob McGrew, OpenAI’s former Chief Research Officer, and Alec Radford, one of the key minds behind the groundbreaking GPT architecture. Their quiet addition to the startup’s website in March signals the increasing influence—and growing expectations—surrounding Murati’s new venture.
Bob McGrew joined OpenAI in its early days and played a central role in shaping the company’s research direction. He initially joined as technical staff in 2017, was elevated to Vice President of Research in 2018, and later became Chief Research Officer. He left OpenAI in September 2024, citing a desire to take a break from the industry. His return to the AI scene via Thinking Machines Lab, albeit in an advisory role, is notable and underscores the startup’s potential in deep research and innovation.
Alec Radford, meanwhile, has had a lasting impact on the AI field. As the lead author of OpenAI’s pivotal research on generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs), he helped lay the foundation for models that now power ChatGPT and other popular AI applications. His work also contributed significantly to Whisper (OpenAI’s speech recognition model) and DALL·E, the image-generating system that drew global attention for its creative capabilities. Radford’s expertise in model architecture and training dynamics brings unparalleled technical depth to the advisory board.
Building a New AI Paradigm: Murati’s Vision
Since its public emergence in early 2024, Thinking Machines Lab has kept its roadmap relatively vague. However, the company has hinted at an ambitious mission: to build AI systems that are “more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable” than existing models. In a statement issued in February, the startup stated its intent to develop tools that make AI work for people’s unique needs and goals—an approach that hints at a blend of personalization, transparency, and flexibility.
This vision appears to deviate from the often opaque, monolithic models that dominate the current AI landscape. Murati seems committed to making AI not only smarter but also more accessible and controllable, focusing on tools that users can shape to fit diverse applications—from research and business to personal productivity and creativity.
A Leadership Team Rooted in OpenAI and DeepMind
Murati isn’t building this vision alone. The leadership team at Thinking Machines Lab reads like a “who’s who” of top AI talent. Alongside her as CEO, John Schulman—OpenAI’s co-founder and one of the architects of reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF)—is serving as Chief Scientist. Schulman’s presence reinforces the company’s credibility in pushing the frontier of model alignment and safety.
Barret Zoph, formerly a key figure at OpenAI responsible for post-training optimization of large language models, has taken on the role of CTO. Zoph’s experience includes fine-tuning state-of-the-art systems to maximize their performance, reliability, and user alignment, which aligns with the company’s focus on making AI systems both powerful and understandable.
Together, this trio commands deep experience from within the highest echelons of AI research and product development—forming a formidable nucleus around which the company is growing.
Funding and Talent: Backed by Ambition
Reports have suggested that Murati has been in discussions to raise over $100 million from major venture capital firms, although the investors remain unnamed. The scale of the rumored funding round speaks to the faith the investment community has in both the leadership team and the problem space the company is addressing.
Beyond its core leadership, Thinking Machines Lab reportedly includes dozens of engineers and researchers from leading AI labs, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind. This influx of elite talent could give the startup a head start in a space increasingly defined by both technological scale and talent wars.
A Quiet Launch, A Loud Future?
Despite the buzz surrounding its team, Thinking Machines Lab has so far opted for a quiet public presence. Its website remains sparse, and the company has not held any public demos or outlined a product release timeline. This deliberate silence may be a strategic move—giving the team time to develop deeply before entering the intensely competitive AI market.
However, the stakes are high. With global AI competition accelerating, and ethical, regulatory, and societal expectations mounting, the startup’s promise to build AI that is more customizable and widely understood resonates with growing calls for transparency, control, and responsible development.
With Mira Murati at the helm and a world-class advisory board now in place, Thinking Machines Lab is positioning itself as a serious challenger in the next wave of AI development. Its emphasis on human-centric, customizable AI could carve out a distinct space amid giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.
As the world watches for the next leap in general AI capability, Thinking Machines Lab may quietly be preparing the infrastructure for not just smarter systems—but smarter human-AI collaboration.
