TL;DRFormer OpenAI CTO Mira Murati made her first major public appearance in 18 months, previewing Thinking Machines Lab’s “interaction models” and arguing that the AI industry lacks structural governance checks. She also addressed researcher departures and reflected on the 2023 Altman firing.
For someone who helped ship ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Codex, Mira Murati has been remarkably quiet. On Thursday, she broke the silence. Sitting down with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in San Francisco, the CEO of Thinking Machines Lab gave her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months, a carefully managed re-entry into a conversation that has moved at breakneck speed without her.
The timing was not accidental. Thinking Machines has spent that year and a half raising $2 billion, securing a gigawatt of Nvidia Vera Rubin compute, shipping one product, and losing a troubling number of the researchers it hired to build the next one. The AI landscape Murati left behind when she departed OpenAI in September 2024 looks nothing like the one she re-entered on Thursday.
The product: interaction models
Murati used the appearance to preview what Thinking Machines is calling “interaction models,” a fundamentally different kind of AI interface. Rather than the prompt-and-response format that defines most AI products, the company’s models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals.
