Mira Murati

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Albanian-American AI executive who shaped ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Sora as OpenAI’s CTO, then founded Thinking Machines Lab with a charter to make AI more widely understood, customizable, and collaboratively useful.

Profile
Born December 16, 1988, Vlorë, Albania
Nationality Albanian-American
Current Institution(s) Thinking Machines Lab (Founder & CEO)
Research Areas Large Language Models, Multimodal AI, Human-AI Collaboration, AI Safety, Fine-Tuning
Education IB Diploma, Pearson College UWC, Canada (2007); BA, Colby College (2011); BEng, Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College (2012)
Website thinkingmachines.ai
X / Twitter @miramurati

Overview

Mira Murati (full name Ermira Murati) is an Albanian-American AI executive and entrepreneur who served as Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI from 2022 to 2024, overseeing the development and deployment of ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex, and Sora — products that collectively redefined public engagement with generative AI. For three turbulent days in November 2023, she was OpenAI’s interim CEO during the board’s abrupt removal of Sam Altman. She departed OpenAI in September 2024 and launched Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025, raising a record-setting $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation by July of that year and releasing her company’s first product, Tinker, in October 2025. By late 2025, the company was in talks to raise at a valuation approaching $50 billion — a trajectory that established Murati as one of the most consequential new AI founders in the post-ChatGPT era.

Early Life & Education

Murati was born on December 16, 1988, in Vlorë, a port city on Albania’s Adriatic coast, and grew up during the country’s post-communist transition. At age 16, she won a United World Colleges scholarship — a merit-based global program — and moved to Pearson College UWC on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, where she received an International Baccalaureate diploma in 2007. The experience gave her early exposure to a diverse, international intellectual environment at a formative age.

She then pursued higher education in the United States through a dual-degree arrangement: a Bachelor of Arts from Colby College in Maine (2011) and a Bachelor of Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College (2012). During the summer of 2011, she interned as an analyst at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, briefly exploring finance before committing to engineering and technology.

Career

Zodiac Aerospace & Tesla — Product Management (2012–2016)

After Dartmouth, Murati completed a brief internship at Zodiac Aerospace (an aerospace components manufacturer) before joining Tesla in 2013 as a product manager on the Model X program. At Tesla she worked in the consumer hardware and vehicle software space during a critical period of the company’s expansion, developing an understanding of how complex technical systems are translated into mass-market products. She left Tesla in 2016.

Leap Motion (2016–2018)

Murati joined Leap Motion (now Ultraleap), a San Francisco augmented reality startup specializing in hand-tracking and gesture interfaces, where she served in a senior product role. The role deepened her experience with human-computer interaction at the frontier of hardware and software — a sensibility that would later shape her emphasis on multimodal, human-centered AI at OpenAI and Thinking Machines Lab.

OpenAI — VP of Applied AI to CTO (2018–2024)

Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 as VP of Applied AI and Partnerships. Over six years she became the central executive responsible for translating OpenAI’s research capabilities into deployed products used by hundreds of millions of people.

Product leadership. As head of applied AI, Murati oversaw the development of Codex (the code-generation model that became the basis for GitHub Copilot), the DALL-E image-generation series, and the GPT family of language models. She was named CTO in May 2022, a role that placed her in charge of OpenAI’s research, product, and safety teams simultaneously. Under her direct leadership, ChatGPT launched in November 2022, reaching 100 million users in two months — then the fastest product adoption in internet history. She also led the internal effort that produced Sora, the text-to-video system unveiled in February 2024.

The November 2023 governance crisis. On November 17, 2023, the OpenAI board abruptly dismissed Sam Altman as CEO and designated Murati interim CEO. She held the position for approximately three days, during which she attempted to navigate a fast-moving internal and investor crisis that threatened to fracture the company. Reporting by The Information (November 2025) later revealed that Murati had collaborated with Ilya Sutskever in the period leading up to the ouster, providing screenshots and information that were incorporated into Sutskever’s 52-page memo of concerns about Altman. Emmett Shear was appointed to replace her as interim CEO on November 20; Altman was reinstated five days later. Murati returned to her CTO role after the crisis and continued in the position for another ten months.

Departure. In September 2024, Murati publicly announced her resignation from OpenAI, stating she wanted time to “do my own exploration.” Her departure coincided with that of chief research officer Bob McGrew and VP of Research Barret Zoph, marking the largest simultaneous executive exit in OpenAI’s history.

Thinking Machines Lab — Founder & CEO (2025–present)

Murati incorporated Thinking Machines Lab as a public benefit corporation and publicly announced it in February 2025. The company’s stated mission is to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable, with a specific emphasis on human-AI collaboration rather than fully autonomous AI. Its research philosophy is explicitly pro-openness: the company has committed to regularly publishing technical blog posts, papers, and code.

Team. By launch, Thinking Machines had assembled roughly 30 researchers and engineers drawn from OpenAI, Meta AI, and Mistral AI. Co-founders include John Schulman (OpenAI co-founder and RLHF architect), Barret Zoph (former OpenAI VP of Research), Lilian Weng (former OpenAI safety and research executive), Luke Metz, and Andrew Tulloch (who later departed for Meta). Alec Radford and Bob McGrew serve as advisors.

Fundraising. By March 2025, Bloomberg reported the company at an estimated $9 billion valuation. In July 2025, Thinking Machines closed a $2 billion seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz — one of the largest seed rounds in Silicon Valley history — at a $12 billion valuation, with participation from Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, Jane Street, and the government of Albania (which contributed $10 million, marking Albania’s formal entry into the global AI market). By November 2025, the company was in early discussions for a follow-on round targeting a valuation between $50 billion and $60 billion.

Governance. Murati holds a weighted majority vote on board decisions at Thinking Machines Lab, an unusual governance structure that reflects lessons drawn from the OpenAI crisis and is intended to preserve founder control through future financing rounds.

Products. Thinking Machines released its first product, Tinker, in October 2025. Tinker is a fine-tuning tool that enables developers and researchers to customize frontier language models for specific tasks or industries without requiring large distributed GPU infrastructure. It has been used by research teams at Princeton University, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley. The company has indicated it plans to release its own base models in 2026 and to add multimodal capabilities to Tinker.

Key Contributions

  • ChatGPT (2022) — As OpenAI CTO, Murati oversaw the development and launch of ChatGPT, the application that brought large language model technology to 100 million users in two months and ignited the generative AI era in consumer markets. The product’s design philosophy — conversational, iterative, accessible to non-technical users — reflected Murati’s product sensibility as much as its underlying research.

  • DALL-E and multimodal AI (2021–2024) — Led the applied product work on DALL-E and DALL-E 2/3, OpenAI’s text-to-image generation systems, establishing the template for multimodal generative AI as a product category and paving the way for Sora.

  • Sora (2024) — Oversaw the development and February 2024 demo launch of Sora, OpenAI’s text-to-video model, which demonstrated the viability of video generation at high visual quality from natural-language prompts and became a reference point for the next generation of generative media.

  • Tinker (2025) — Thinking Machines Lab’s first product, released October 2025, providing a streamlined LLM fine-tuning interface that lowers the infrastructure cost of model customization for researchers and developers. Early adoption at Princeton, Stanford, and Berkeley signals traction in the research community.

  • “Language & Coding Creativity” (Daedalus, Spring 2022) — Published a peer-reviewed essay in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, reflecting on the intersection of language models and creative production — one of the few substantive public intellectual contributions from a sitting AI executive during the GPT-3 era.

Awards & Recognition

  • TIME100 Next (2023) — Named to Time magazine’s list of the most influential emerging leaders globally, one of the earliest major recognitions of her profile at OpenAI.
  • Fortune Most Powerful Women in Business (57th, 2023) — Ranked among the 100 most powerful women in business by Fortune, the only AI lab executive at that position in that year’s list.
  • Honorary Doctor of Science, Dartmouth College (June 2024) — Awarded by her alma mater “for having democratized technology and advanced a better, safer world.”

Key Relationships

  • Sam Altman — Former colleague and superior at OpenAI; their relationship became publicly strained during and after the November 2023 governance crisis, in which Murati played a role in the sequence of events that led to his temporary removal.
  • Ilya Sutskever — OpenAI co-founder with whom Murati collaborated closely in the period leading to the November 2023 board crisis; the two shared concerns about the direction of the organization that informed the board’s decision.
  • John Schulman — OpenAI co-founder, RLHF pioneer, and co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab; the most prominent member of the team that followed Murati from OpenAI to her new venture.
  • Barret Zoph — Former OpenAI VP of Research who departed alongside Murati and became a co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab; one of the principal architects of frontier model training methods.
  • Lilian Weng — Former head of OpenAI’s safety team, co-founder at Thinking Machines Lab; her involvement signals the company’s intention to integrate safety research from the outset.
  • Alec Radford — OpenAI researcher who co-authored GPT, CLIP, and Whisper; serves as an advisor to Thinking Machines Lab, representing a link to OpenAI’s foundational research work.
  • Bob McGrew — Former OpenAI chief research officer who departed in the same wave as Murati; serves as an advisor to Thinking Machines Lab.

Personal Style

Murati occupies a rare position in the AI industry: an executive of the first order whose profile is defined by product judgment and organizational leadership rather than primary research authorship. Her public statements consistently emphasize that the most important question in AI development is not raw capability but whether systems can be made genuinely useful and safe for a broad range of people — a position she has held consistently from her OpenAI years through Thinking Machines Lab’s founding documents. She tends to engage with AI safety as an empirical and iterative problem rather than a purely philosophical one, stressing deployment feedback, red-teaming, and post-deployment monitoring over alignment theory. Her stated emphasis on human-AI collaboration, multimodality, and model customization at Thinking Machines Lab represents a deliberate divergence from the autonomous-agent framing dominant at some competitor labs. Publicly, she projects composure and precision; she is notably sparing with speculative claims about AI timelines or capabilities, a contrast to some of her peers.

References