New Advisors for Thinking Machines Lab

Thinking Machines Lab, Mira Murati's new venture and former OpenAI CTO, has recently welcomed two prominent advisors: Bob McGrew and Alec Radford. McGrew was OpenAI's chief research officer, while Radford contributed to many significant innovations at the company. Their names were added to the Thinking Machines Lab website in March, but no official statement has been provided regarding this.

Bob McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 as a member of the technical staff. In 2018, he was promoted to VP of research and later became chief research officer. He left OpenAI in September 2024, stating he wanted to take a break. Alec Radford, on the other hand, left OpenAI late last year to pursue independent research. He was the lead author of the seminal research paper on generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), which underpin OpenAI's most popular products, such as ChatGPT.

Radford also worked on various models in the GPT series, as well as on speech recognition models like Whisper and DALL-E, OpenAI's image-generating model. Thinking Machines Lab has kept a low profile regarding its research agenda and product roadmap. However, in a February announcement, the startup stated its intention to develop tools to "make AI work for people's unique needs and goals." Additionally, it aims to create AI systems that are "more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable" than those currently available.

Mira Murati serves as the CEO of Thinking Machines Lab. John Schulman, OpenAI co-founder, is the company's chief scientist, while Barret Zoph, who led model post-training at OpenAI, is the CTO. Murati left OpenAI last October after six years. She joined OpenAI as VP of applied AI and partnerships and was promoted to CTO in 2022. She led the development of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and the code-generating system Codex, which powered early versions of GitHub's Copilot programming assistant.

At one point, Murati was said to be in talks to raise over $100 million from unnamed VC firms for Thinking Machines Lab. The startup already counts dozens of employees from top AI labs, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind.