MIRA MURATI STILL wants to build AI superintelligence. But the ex-CTO of OpenAI sees human intelligence as a critical part of the equation.
At a time of rising worry over AI eliminating jobs and increasing the power of few big companies, Murati’s startup, Thinking Machines Lab, offers a radically different vision of the technology.
“At some point we will have super-intelligent machines,” Murati tells WIRED. “But we think that the best way to actually have many possible futures—good futures—is to keep humans in the loop.”
Murati says AI doesn’t need to automate humans out of the equation. A more optimistic approach, she suggests, is to let people build and customize their own frontier AI models, then work with those models to achieve their goals.
This week, Thinking Machines previewed a new kind of AI model that it says points toward a more human-inclusive reality. The company’s “interaction models” are trained to communicate with a person through a camera and microphone. Unlike many existing voice-mode interfaces, the new models do not simply capture and transcribe speech, then feed it into a language model that processes it in the same way as a chatbot. The interaction models natively understand continuous, messy, human communication—meaning they are better able to grasp the meaning of pauses, interruptions, and changes in tone. This allows them to adapt on the fly when someone clarifies a point or changes the subject. The company showed off several videos demonstrating these capabilities, though the models have not been released publicly.
