Mira Murati's Startup Might Rival OpenAI, Anthropic
Heads with colorful cubes as a symbol of mentoring and psychotherapy.
People are talking about a new startup that's poised to offer detailed custom services around LLMs.
Thinking Labs, according to news from The Information and other sources, will look to offer clients customized AI platforms based on KPIs and other business intelligence, using reinforcement learning.
That sounds like big news in the current context, where there's a big need for any detailed implementations that can be customized for a business. So with all of the brouhaha around Thinking Labs, who is its fearless leader? Because since the news is so scant around the business itself, any context that you get as a reporter would have to deal with Murati's past career moves.
Murati's Background
So with that said, what do we know about Mira Murati? She's from Albania, born in 1988, and has significant experience at both OpenAI and Tesla. She also has a mechanical engineering degree from Dartmouth College.
As CTO at OpenAI, Murati led the development, deployment, and scaling of flagship products like ChatGPT and DALL·E. Then she actually became temporary CEO during Altman's ouster.
So it makes sense, given the potential business rivalry, to ask: what is her connection to Sam Altman?
A post from The Decoder in 2024 shows Murati has publicly denied conflict with Altman, calling the board's decision to fire him 'perplexing' and claiming that herself and others worked to get him back. Famously, Altman was rather quickly reinstated, to continue leading OpenAI into the future, while writing some pretty cogent essays on AI which I've covered recently.
As for the connection between Musk and Murati, since she also worked at Tesla, I'll cite another Inc. piece from last June titled: 'Open AI's Pushback of Elon Musk's Criticism Shows How to Defend Your Company Reputation.'
'Mira Murati, OpenAI's chief technology officer, knows more than Musk does about how her company's systems work,' wrote tech reporter Kit Eaton. 'Using carefully chosen words in a speech, she made that very clear.'
I thought Eaton's characterization of Musk's challenge, and the resulting pushback, was pretty well written, even though it sounds a little sensationalized at the end:
'Normally bearish on AI tech, Musk swore he'd ban Apple devices from his companies if OpenAI tech was integrated at a deep level, and even warned the public in an X posting he thought Apple was 'selling you down the river' with 'creepy spyware.' OpenAI's CTO has now addressed Musk's outrage, and her words put Musk in his place.'
Anyway, this serves to illustrate how, at the helm, Murati had to address Musk's input. Aside from that, there don't seem to be a lot of public examples of anything significantly interesting happening between the two prominent tech people (Murati and Musk, that is.)
Ok, enough tea. But again, the reason that people will be looking into Mira Murati goes as follows: 1. Thinking Labs will be a big player. 2. There's a dearth of public information about Thinking Labs and what it is doing. 3. Our ability to contextualize rests with Murati's past job experience as a pro at both rival firms, with two tech moguls who later had words.
Why Does This Matter So Much?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the reason that tech news will be covering this in the first place is that today is the era of microservices, and of services in general. In another post, I covered how my friend and colleague Dave Blundin was talking about digital services needing technical support, with the promise of an AI Internet evolving. He specifically mentioned CRM, as an example. That made sense to me: too many vendors are selling 'Cadillac' CRM systems that are not sufficiently customized to what the firm needs. If this customization can be automated – the result is anybody's guess, really.
That said, I believe that Thinking Labs is probably going to be on the vanguard along with its rivals in offering the hundreds of thousands of companies across the U.S. tools to compete in today's business world, which now often seems to have been injected with AI adrenaline.
And we're seeing a kind of all-or-nothing consolidation playing out across the tech industry: a few special firms (like OpenAI) are going to reap the fruits of the universal move toward AI-native systems. Keep an eye out for Thinking Labs and other dark horse companies as the race continues.
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