The gold rush of the AI revolution shows no sign of slowing down.
Thinking Machines, the startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is now valued at $10 billion. Thinking Machines raised $2 billion in a fresh funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Sarah Guo’s Conviction Partners.
Interestingly, Thinking Machines has released no products, or even given much insight into what it does. But it’s had the advantage of having some high-profile founders and early employees. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati had quit in September 2024, not long after the leadership drama at OpenAI. It had been believed that she had had some role to play in the coup, even though she’d publicly always appeared to back Altman. But five months after her departure from OpenAI, she’d announced a new startup named Thinking Machines.
“I started Thinking Machines Lab alongside a remarkable team of scientists, engineers, and builders,” Murati had 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 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.
Apart from Murati, Thinking Machines’ team includes Christian Gibson, who had been serving on OpenAI’s supercomputing team, Barret Zoph, who had left OpenAI around the same time as her, and Jonathan Lachman, who had led special projects at OpenAI. One of OpenAI’s co-founders, John Schulman, had left Anthropic and joined Thinking Machines.
It would be unusual for a startup to be valued at $10 billion without having launched any sort of service or product, but such deals have become commonplace in the AI world. Former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever’s startup, SSI, is valued at $32 billion without having released any products or models so far, and is reportedly aiming for a one-shot creation of superintelligence. Meanwhile, Meta has reportedly been offering $100 million bonuses to top AI researchers, and has acquired a stake in Scale AI for $14 billion. AI might be poised to wipe out many white-collar jobs, but it sure is making sure that the top people in the field will make generational wealth before the arrival of AGI.