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The former CTO and interim CEO of the Microsoft-backed (NASDAQ:MSFT) OpenAI, Mira Murati, has raised $2B in a funding round for her new artificial intelligence startup, Thinking Machines Lab.
Andreessen Horowitz, a16z, led the funding round, which included participation by Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD), ServiceNow (NOW), Cisco Systems (CSCO) and others.
“We’re building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world – through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate,” Murati said in a post on X today. “We’re excited that in the next couple months we’ll be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open-source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models. Soon, we’ll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems.”
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 and was named chief technology officer in 2020. She briefly served as OpenAI’s CEO in late 2023 when Sam Altman was temporarily ousted from the startup by its board of directors. She returned to the CTO position after Altman was reinstated as CEO. She left OpenAI about a year later. During her time as CTO, she oversaw efforts on ChatGPT, Dall-E, Codex and Sora. Before her time at OpenAI, she was a product manager at Tesla (TSLA) for the Model X.