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Ermira "Mira"Murati (born 16 December 1988) is an Albanian-American business executive.[2] She launched an AI startup calledThinking Machines Lab in February 2025. Previously she was the chief technology officer ofOpenAI, and a senior product manager atTesla.
Murati interned in 2011 as a summer analyst atGoldman Sachs inTokyo, Japan.[3][15] She then briefly worked forZodiac Aerospace as an intern before joining the electric car companyTesla in 2013 as a product manager on theModel X.[3] From 2016 to 2018, she worked for the augmented reality start-upLeap Motion (now Ultraleap).[3]
In 2018, she joinedOpenAI as the VP of Applied AI and partnerships.[16][17] She becamechief technology officer (CTO) in May 2022.[18] She led OpenAI's work onChatGPT,Dall-E,Codex andSora, while overseeing its research, product and safety teams.[16][19][20][21] She oversaw technical advancements and direction of OpenAI's various projects, including the development of advanced AI models and tools. Murati worked on several of OpenAI's notable products, such as theGenerative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) series of language models.[22][23] Commenting about the potential loss of creative jobs to AI, Murati said that "maybe [the jobs] shouldn’t have been there in the first place".[24] In October 2023, Murati was ranked 57th onFortune's list of "The 100 Most Powerful Women in Business of 2023".[25][26]
In November 2023, Murati became interim chief executive officer of OpenAI following theremoval of Sam Altman from the job.[27][28][13][29] She had collaborated withIlya Sutskever, whose 52-page memo outlining concerns about Altman relied heavily on screenshots and information she provided, which contributed to the board's decision to oust him.[30][31] Murati was replaced byEmmett Shear three days later, who left when Altman was reinstated five days later. Following these events, Murati returned to her role as CTO.[32][33][34] In June 2024, Dartmouth College awarded Murati an honoraryDoctor of Science for having "democratized technology and advanced a better, safer world for us all".[35][36]
In September 2024, Murati announced that she was stepping down as CTO to allow her the opportunity to "do my own exploration".[37] This move came amid a wider executive exodus as OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew and a vice president of research, Barret Zoph, also announced their departures soon after.[38]
In February 2025 Murati launched a new public benefit corporation calledThinking Machines Lab which claimed to aim to "to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable."[39][40] She was reported to have hired "a team of about 30 leading researchers and engineers from competitors including Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI."[41][42][43][44] People involved with the startup include OpenAI cofounderJohn Schulman, and advisors Alec Radford and Bob McGrew.[45] The following month,Bloomberg reported that the company had reached an estimated valuation of $9 billion, with an "average founder stake value" of $1.4 billion.[46]
In April 2025, Thinking Machines Lab reportedly aimed for a $2 billion seed round (requiring a minimum investment of $50 million).[40][47][45][1] The round was led byAndreessen Horowitz and included participation from the government of Albania, valuing the company at $12 billion.[48][2]
Thinking Machines Lab follows a governance structure wherein Mira Murati holds a deciding vote on board matters, weighted to provide her with a majority decision-making capability.[49]
In October 2025, Thinking Machines Lab announced its first product, Tinker, a tool used to create custom frontier AI models.[50]
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