I’ve been following Thinking Machines Lab since we first heard that former high-ranking OpenAI executive Mira Murati left the ChatGPT developer to start her own AI venture, wondering what sort of AI product Murati and her growing team of AI researchers would deliver.
Less than a year since Murati left OpenAI, we now have news of a commercial AI product from Thinking Machines Lab, which arrived after a record seed funding round. Reports said that Thinking Machines Lab was seeking $2 billion in funding at a $10 billion valuation. Murati’s startup beat that, scoring over $2 billion in seed money at a $12 billion valuation.
It’s no wonder Murati had to make a public announcement regarding the company’s commercial plans. Thinking Machines Lab must have some promising AI on its hands if it was able to convince investors to fork over that sort of money. Then again, AI continues to be the hottest thing in town. Investors are dying to fund the right project, and Thinking Machines Lab might be one.
We don’t have any specifics about the Thinking Machines Lab product(s) that are coming soon, but Murati did say the company will introduce its first product in the coming months and that the AI tool will have an open-source component:
We’re building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world – through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate. We’re excited that in the next couple of months we’ll be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models. Soon, we’ll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems.
The announcement is certainly exciting to any AI enthusiast. It will also be interesting to see if Thinking Machines Lab can beat OpenAI to the punch by releasing an open-source AI model first. As a reminder, OpenAI has had to postpone its open ChatGPT version twice now, with a launch now expected this summer.
Murati, who was OpenAI’s CTO before leaving the company in September (and interim CEO during Sam Altman’s ousting in the fall of 2023), dropped the news above in a post on X that also confirmed the massive funding round. Murati said Thinking Machines Lab raised $2 billion, “led by a16z [Andreessen Horowitz] with participation from NVIDIA, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, Jane Street, and more who share our mission.”
The announcement also notes that Thinking Machines Lab continues to look for “extraordinary talent.” Murati isn’t the only former OpenAI scientist at Thinking Machines Lab. Around two-thirds of the initial list of 30 Thinking Machines Lab hires are former OpenAI employees.
It’s also great to see that Thinking Machines Lab hasn’t been sold to Meta, deciding to strike out on its own. Previous reports said Zuckerberg’s corporation was in talks to purchase Thinking Machines Lab earlier this year. Meta has been on a hiring spree recently, as it’s speeding towards developing AI superintelligence by spending big money on talent and infrastructure. Thinking Machines Lab also inked a deal with Google to use Google Cloud to power its mysterious AI models.
While we have to wait a few more months for an AI product from Thinking Machines Lab, it’s interesting to see Murati’s approach differ from Safe Superintelligence, Ilya Sutskever’s AI startup. Sutskever is a former key OpenAI executive who left the company before Murati. Sutskever confirmed at the time that Safe Superintelligence would develop superintelligence, but has yet to release a product. Despite that, he raised $3 billion (in two funding rounds) at a $32 billion valuation, according to reports. Like Murati, Sutskever didn’t sell to Meta.
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