Thinking Machines Lab

Overview

Thinking Machines Lab is an AI research & product company founded in 2025 by Mira Murati (former CTO of openai). The company positions itself as a research-first, multimodal AI lab focused on building collaborative AI systems that act as teammates for knowledge workers and researchers rather than opaque, single-purpose agents. Early coverage reports significant venture and industry backing and a rapid hiring push, including engineers and researchers with prior experience at major AI organizations.

Mission & focus

• Multimodal AI systems (language + vision + audio + video) designed for collaborative workflows
• Research-to-product tooling that emphasizes reproducibility, transparency, and programmatic control
• Developer/researcher-first platforms for training, fine-tuning, and deploying models with robust guardrails

Key products and offerings

• Tinker — a Python-first API/SDK for distributed fine-tuning and experiment control (see separate note)
• Managed distributed compute and training infrastructure for research teams
• Tooling for dataset versioning, experiment tracking, and reproducible pipelines

Connections

• Founder: Mira Murati (ex-openai CTO)
• Hiring: reported to include ex-OpenAI engineers and researchers
• Investors & partners: reported interest and backing from major VCs and infrastructure vendors (reported in industry coverage)

Expectations

Thinking Machines is positioned to become a prominent player in the niche between closed proprietary model vendors and fully open-source stacks. Expect:

• Rapid product releases aimed at researcher and enterprise teams
• Emphasis on tooling for fine-grained model customization and observability
• Partnerships with cloud and GPU infrastructure providers

Risks & unknowns

• Competitive landscape: large incumbents (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta) and open-source players (MosaicML, Hugging Face, Mistral, etc.) will compete on model quality and developer experience
• Execution risk: translating a research-first vision into sustainable products and revenue is non-trivial and capital intensive

Sources

This note is based on reporting and public announcements from 2024–2025 about the company, its founding, and early product/engineering signals. Primary sources include company announcements, industry reporting, and interviews with the founder in tech press and podcasts.