Mira Murati steps back into the spotlight, carefully
Key takeaways
- Mira Murati isn t a natural creature of the conference stage.
- Thinking Machines has spent the better part of a year and a half operating largely in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers, and shipping one product, Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-source AI models.
- In the meantime, the companies competing for the same talent, customers, and headlines have only grown more omnipresent.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Mira Murati isn t a natural creature of the conference stage. As the CTO of Open AI, she was present but rarely the public face of the company. As CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, she has been even harder to find. So when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday — her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months — it was worth paying attention, even if she was careful not to say too much.
The timing makes sense. Thinking Machines has spent the better part of a year and a half operating largely in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers, and shipping one product, Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-source AI models.
In the meantime, the companies competing for the same talent, customers, and headlines have only grown more omnipresent. OpenAI, where Murati spent six years as CTO, is constantly in the news cycle. Anthropic s momentum is all that anyone can talk about right now. And xAI, Elon Musk s AI venture, has been folded into SpaceX ahead of what is expected to be its massive public offering, generating its own gravitational pull on attention and investment. In that environment, staying heads down has diminishing returns; at some point, you have to make some noise just to remind the market you exist.