Mira Murati returns to public view with measured Bloomberg interview
12 reported2 unconfirmed
Mira Murati, former OpenAI CTO and now CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, gave her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months during a Bloomberg interview in San Francisco on Thursday. Murati used the appearance to preview her company’s new “interaction models,” which she described as a fundamentally different AI interface that processes continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals. She also addressed the November 2023 episode when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO, stating she felt clear about her decisions in each moment but would have pushed for more information and transparency in retrospect. When asked if she still trusts her former boss, she sidestepped the question and instead raised concerns about the concentration of consequential decisions in too few hands across the industry. She downplayed recent departures of high-profile researchers from Thinking Machines, attributing it to normal organizational volatility and noting that compensation packages are not usually the whole story. Murati pushed back on framing AI’s future as inevitable dystopia or utopia, arguing the current period will determine the outcome.
What’s reported
Murati gave her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months on Thursday in San Francisco with Bloomberg.
She is CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, which has raised capital, hired researchers, and shipped one product, Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-source AI models.
She previewed “interaction models” that process continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals.
She declined to put a specific release date on anything.
She said she felt clear about her decisions during the November 2023 OpenAI board firing of Sam Altman and her role as interim CEO.
She said the company would have “imploded” if not for her involvement.
In retrospect, she said she would have pushed for more information, a better transition plan, and more transparency.
She sidestepped whether she still trusts Sam Altman, steering to concerns about concentration of decisions in too few hands.
She downplayed departures of high-profile researchers from Thinking Machines, citing normal organizational volatility.
She said of her competitive instincts, “When I wake up in the morning, I am not thinking about how to kill the competitor.”
She pushed back on framing of inevitable dystopia or utopia, saying neither outcome is predetermined.
She said if humans take their hands off the wheel too soon, the future will look very different and not better.
Open questions
No specific release date for Thinking Machines’ interaction models was provided.
Whether Murati thinks things turned out well after the November 2023 OpenAI episode was not directly answered.
Key figures
Mira Murati, CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, former CTO of OpenAI
Emily Chang, Bloomberg interviewer
Sam Altman, former boss of Murati at OpenAI
Sources: TechCrunch
