Mira Murati is an Albanian-American engineer and technology executive who guided OpenAI's flagship products—including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and DALL·E—as chief technology officer from 2022 to 2024. After briefly serving as OpenAI's interim CEO during its 2023 leadership crisis, she left in late 2024 to found Thinking Machines Lab, a public-benefit company aiming to make advanced AI transparent and customizable. A regular voice in global discussions on AI governance, Murati has been named to Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list and received an honorary Doctor of Science from Dartmouth College.123
From Tesla to OpenAI Leadership
Murati began her career managing the aerodynamic design of Tesla's Model X before leading immersive-computing projects at Leap Motion. She joined OpenAI in 2018, rising from VP of Applied AI to CTO and orchestrating cross-functional teams that shipped GPT-4, Whisper, and the Sora video model. Her calm crisis management saw her installed as interim CEO when Sam Altman was briefly ousted in 2023, underscoring her operational credibility.12
Thinking Machines Lab's Ambitious Transparency Vision
In late 2024 Murati unveiled Thinking Machines Lab, positioning it as a research and product studio committed to open-sourcing core capabilities and regularly publishing safety evaluations.45 The startup quickly lured top researchers from OpenAI, Meta, and Mistral and is reportedly targeting a record-setting $2 billion seed round that could value the company above $10 billion.4 Its stated goal is to give enterprises and governments "the knobs" to align models to their own norms while sharing progress with the broader community.
Advocating Responsible and Regulated AI
Throughout media appearances and testimony, Murati has argued that advanced AI must be built hand-in-hand with policy, calling for licensing regimes for frontier models and urging proactive safety research. She maintains that smarter systems can be easier to align, emphasizing iterative deployment and public feedback as guardrails.13 Her pragmatic yet hopeful style has made her a leading interpreter of generative AI's risks and rewards.