Mira Murati breaks silence on Thinking Machines and OpenAI’s past

Thinking Machines has spent the last year operating in the shadows, focusing on hiring and shipping Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-source models. While rivals like Anthropic and xAI command headlines and massive capital, Murati is now positioning her startup around "interaction models." These systems aim to process audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals, attempting to capture the nuance of human communication rather than relying on traditional, turn-based prompting.

Beyond her product, Murati addressed the "blip"—the chaotic 2023 week when OpenAI’s board ousted Sam Altman. She maintained that her actions were necessary to prevent an organizational implosion, though she admitted that, in hindsight, she should have demanded more transparency regarding the board's transition plan. When pressed on whether she still trusts her former colleagues, she deflected, instead highlighting a systemic concern: the concentration of power within a few firms and the lack of structural governance in the industry.

Murati also addressed recent executive departures at her own company, framing them as the inevitable turbulence of building a frontier lab at high speed. While she acknowledged the intense financial pressures of the talent war, she resisted the apocalyptic framing often applied to AI's future. For Murati, the outcome of the current technological shift remains unwritten, provided that developers and policymakers keep their hands firmly on the wheel.