Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI and now CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday for her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months. Thinking Machines has spent the better part of a year and a half operating largely in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers, and shipping one product, Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open source AI models.
Murati used the appearance to preview what Thinking Machines is calling “interaction models.” She described them as a fundamentally different kind of AI interface. Rather than the turn-based, prompt-and-response dynamic that defines most AI products today, the company’s models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals. The idea is that they can pick up on the texture of human communication including interruptions, mid-thought corrections, and pauses to think in something closer to real time. Murati framed it as a first step, not a finished product, and declined to put a specific release date on anything.
Murati Reflects On OpenAI’s 2023 Board Crisis And Her Role As Interim CEO
Murati also answered questions about the week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO. Inside OpenAI it came to be called “the blip.” Murati said she felt clear about her decisions in each moment, that protecting the mission and the team was the through-line that made the choices feel obvious even as the situation appeared to be falling apart from the outside. She said the company would have “imploded” if not for her involvement through that five-day stretch and its immediate aftermath. She acknowledged that clarity of intent is not the same as clarity about consequences. In retrospect, she said she would have pushed harder for more information and an actual transition plan. She did not say whether she thinks things turned out well.
Asked whether she still trusts her former boss, she sidestepped the question. She steered the conversation toward a larger concern: the concentration of consequential decisions in too few hands, not just at OpenAI but across the industry. Her worry, she said, is less about the character of any individual leader and more about the absence of structural checks. Good people make bad calls. Well-intentioned organizations drift. Too much attention has been paid to virtue and too little to governance, she suggested.
Departures Of Researchers Downplayed As Normal Organizational Volatility
Chang pressed her on the departures of several high-profile researchers from Thinking Machines in recent months, a subject Murati has largely avoided in public. She downplayed the departures on Thursday. First, she said, building a frontier AI lab from scratch compresses years of normal organizational volatility into months. She acknowledged that compensation packages of nine figures capture people’s imaginations but suggested it is not usually the whole story. To some audience laughter, she said of her own competitive instincts, “When I wake up in the morning, I am not thinking about how to kill the competitor.”
Murati Argues Neither Dystopia Nor Utopia Is Predetermined
Chang asked about what comes next for AI broadly, including for humans who AI companies once said would be empowered but who have more recently grown scared by talk of mass job displacement and a future where AI creates chemical weapons. Murati pushed back on the framing of inevitable dystopia or inevitable utopia, arguing that neither outcome is predetermined and that the current period is the one that will determine which way things go. She said if humans take their hands off the wheel too soon, the future will look very different, and not better.
Featured image credits: Magnific.com
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