By its launch in February 2025, Thinking Machines Lab was reported to have hired about 30 researchers and engineers from competitors includingOpenAI,Meta AI, andMistral AI.[6][7][8][9][10] Its founding team members include Barret Zoph, former OpenAI VP of Research (Post-Training), Lilian Weng, former OpenAI VP, and OpenAI cofounderJohn Schulman, who joined after a brief stint at the lab's competitorAnthropic.[11][12] Other former OpenAI employees who have been hired include Jonathan Lachman and Andrew Tulloch (although Tulloch departed after getting recruited forMeta Superintelligence Labs).[13][14] Thinking Machines Lab's advisers include Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI's chief research officer, and Alec Radford, who was a lead researcher for OpenAI.[15][16]
On October 1, 2025, it announced Tinker, anAPI forfine-tuning language models. Users would submit jobs through the API for fine-tuning one of the various open-weight models supported. The Lab would run the jobs on its internal clusters and training infrastructure.[17]
Thinking Machines Lab grants Mira Murati a deciding vote on board matters, weighted to provide her with a majority decision-making capability. Additionally, founding shareholders possess votes weighted 100 times greater than those of regular shareholders.[18]
In July 2025,Andreessen Horowitz was reported to have led the company's initial funding round, raising "about $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion".[3][19] The government ofAlbania (Murati's country of origin) was also included in this round, making a $10 million investment which required an amendment to the country's 2025 budget.[20][21]
