Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, has launched Thinking Machines Lab, a new artificial intelligence startup.
The San Francisco-based company, announced on Tuesday, aims to create AI systems that are more accessible, customisable, and capable across a broader range of applications.
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Thinking Machines Lab focuses on ethical AI
Thinking Machines Lab emphasises AI alignment, focusing on embedding human values into AI models to ensure safety and reliability. The company plans to share its code, datasets, and model specifications with the wider research community to promote collaboration and transparency.
Murati said, “We’re building three things: Helping people adapt AI systems to work for their specific needs, Developing strong foundations to build more capable AI systems, Fostering a…”.
Mira Murati assembles team of AI experts
Murati has assembled a team of approximately 30 top researchers and engineers, with around two-thirds coming from OpenAI. Notable hires include Barret Zoph, who will serve as Chief Technology Officer, and OpenAI co-founder John Schulman, who has been appointed Chief Scientist.
Other key members include Lilian Weng, OpenAI’s former vice president of safety. Thinking Machines Lab is actively hiring machine learning scientists and engineers, as well as a research program manager.
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Thinking Machines Lab intends to build tooling to “make AI work for [people’s] unique needs and goals” and to create AI systems that are “more widely understood, customisable, and generally capable” than those currently available.
The company will focus on building “multimodal” systems that “work with people collaboratively” and that can “adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum” of applications.
Prior to OpenAI, Murati spent three years at Tesla as a senior product manager of the Model X, during which time Tesla released early versions of Autopilot, its AI-enabled driver-assistance software. She also was VP of product and engineering at Leap Motion, a startup building hand—and finger-tracking motion sensors for PCs.
