OpenAI has spawned yet another AI company.
After Anthropic and Safe Superintelligence (SSI) were founded by former OpenAI employees, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has also announced her new AI startup. Named “Thinking Machines”, the company will look to advance AI to make it “broadly useful”.
“I started Thinking Machines Lab alongside a remarkable team of scientists, engineers, and builders,” Murati wrote on X. “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 culture of open science that helps the whole field understand and improve these systems Our goal is simple, advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science, and practical applications,” she added.
“We are scientists, engineers, and builders who’ve created some of the most widely used AI products, including ChatGPT and Character.ai, open-weights models like Mistral, as well as popular open source projects like PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq, and Segment Anything,” the company’s website says. Recently, former OpenAI co-founder John Schulman had also joined Murati’s effort.
“Congrats on company launch to Thinking Machines! Very strong team, a large fraction of whom were directly involved with and built the ChatGPT miracle. Wonderful people, an easy follow, and wishing the team all the best!” wrote former OpenAI executive Andrej Karpathy.
Murati had quit OpenAI in September last year. She had said that she would “do her own exploration” after her stint with OpenAI. Murati had spent 6 and a half years at OpenAI, and had been the company’s CTO when it had released its groundbreaking ChatGPT product.
Thinking Machines will be yet another prominent lab from the OpenAI stable. In 2020, OpenAI employees led by Dario Amodei had founded Anthropic, and its Claude model competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Last year, OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever had also left the company after supposedly being involved in a coup to remove OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and had launched his own startup, SSI, which is now worth $30 billion. And with Mira Murati also launching Thinking Machines, OpenAI’s alumni seem to be continuing to make their mark in the AI space.