Mira Murati
Founder & CEO of Thinking Machines Lab · Former CTO of OpenAI
Mira Murati
One-line summary: Former OpenAI CTO, founder/CEO of thinking-machines-lab; shipped the 975B open-weight Inkling model on a contrarian "customization over leaderboard dominance" bet. (Discussed, not a speaker in these sources.)
What they're known for
Left OpenAI (where she was CTO) and raised one of the largest seed rounds on record to start Thinking Machines Lab. First product: Inkling, an open-weight, natively-multimodal 975B-parameter MoE model designed to be downloaded and fine-tuned on-prem.
Why they matter to artificial-intelligence
Murati is the highest-profile US founder to bet against frontier-leaderboard dominance and for enterprise customization: per peter-diamandis in 2026-07-17-podcast-moonshots-mira-murati-s-975b-open-model-ramin-hasani-on, "she's not claiming it's the best model on earth... she's betting that AI companies can adapt her models for themselves, that customization over leaderboard dominance is what's going to win her the day." That a top ex-OpenAI leader built a company around the open-weight/fine-tuning thesis is treated on-pod as a signal about where insiders think value is going. david-sacks also flags her as a potential broad-representation member of any AI SRO precisely because Inkling is open-source-based (see ai-self-regulatory-body). Full detail on the lab and model: thinking-machines-lab.
Sources
- 2026-07-17-podcast-moonshots-mira-murati-s-975b-open-model-ramin-hasani-on (multi-context, vault/sources/)
- 2026-07-18-podcast-all-in-podcast-can-the-ai-industry-regulate-itself-stripe-wants (multi-context, vault/sources/)