Mira Murati steps back into the spotlight, carefully

Mira Murati is not a natural on the conference stage. As CTO of OpenAI, she was present, but rarely the public face of the company. As CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, she was even harder to find. So when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday — her first major media appearance in about 18 months — it was worth paying attention, even as she was careful not to say too much.

The timing makes sense. Thinking Machines has spent the better part of a year and a half largely in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers and shipping one product. Tinkeran API for refining open-source AI models.

Meanwhile, the companies competing for the same talent, the same customers, and the same headlines have only become more ubiquitous. OpenAI, where Murati worked as CTO for six years, is constantly in the news cycle. Anthropic’s momentum is all anyone can talk about right now. And xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture, has been folded into SpaceX ahead of what is expected to be its massive public offering, generating its own draw for attention and investment. In that climate, continuing to hold leads to diminishing returns; at some point you have to make some noise to remind the market that you exist.

Murati used the Bloomberg appearance to do just that and little more. She previewed what Thinking Machines calls “interaction models,” which she described as a fundamentally different kind of AI interface. Instead of the turn-based, prompt-and-response dynamics that define most AI products today, she told interviewer Emily Chang, the company’s models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text and video at 200-millisecond intervals. The idea is that they can pick up the texture of human communication – the interruptions, the mid-thought corrections, even pauses for thought – in something closer to real time. But Murati was careful to view it as a first step and not a finished product, and she declined to put a specific release date on anything.

She also answered questions about the episode that first brought her into the public eye: the chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO. Within OpenAI it was called ‘the blip’. Murati said she felt clear about her decisions at every moment – ​​that protecting the mission and the team was the common thread that made the choices obvious, even when the situation seemed to be collapsing from the outside. She said the company would have “imploded” if she had not been involved during that strange five-day period and its immediate aftermath. But she acknowledged that clarity of intent is not the same as clarity of consequences. In retrospect, she said, she would have pushed harder for more information, a better transition plan and more transparency. What she didn’t say, at least not directly, is whether she thinks it turned out well.

When asked if she still trusts her former boss, she sidestepped the question and steered the conversation toward a larger issue that she returned to several times: the concentration of resulting decisions in too few hands – not just at OpenAI but across the industry. Her concerns, she said, are less about the character of an individual leader (although she acknowledged that matters) and more about the lack of structural controls. Good people make bad decisions. Well-meaning organizations go astray. Too much attention has been paid to virtue and not enough to governance, she suggested.

Chang also politely pressed her about the departure of several high-profile Thinking Machines researchers in recent months, a topic Murati has largely avoided in public and which she downplayed on Thursday. First, she says, building a groundbreaking AI lab from scratch compresses years of normal organizational volatility into months. She also acknowledged that compensation – the nine-figure packages that have become standard currency in the war for AI talent – ​​captures the imagination, but she suggested that is usually not the whole story. To laughter from the audience, she said of her own competitive instincts, “When I wake up in the morning, I don’t think about how to kill the competitor.”

Naturally, Chang asked about what’s coming for AI in general, including for the people who AI companies once said would be empowered by AI but have recently been frightened by talk of massive job displacement, not to mention a future where AI is used to make chemical weapons.

Murati, who was born in Albania and speaks with a slight Eastern European accent, was measured in her response. She returned to the formulation of inevitable dystopia or inevitable utopia, arguing that neither outcome is predetermined and that the period we are in now is the period that will determine which way things go. Yet she said – and not for the first time during the interview – that if people take their hands off the wheel too quickly, the future will look very different, not better.