source: techcrunch ai: mira murati steps back into the spotlight, carefully

level: business

mira murati, ceo of thinking machines lab and former cto of openai, appeared at a bloomberg event in san francisco for her first major media interview in roughly 18 months. she discussed her new company's direction, including a product called tinker, an api for fine-tuning open-source ai models. murati also previewed what thinking machines calls interaction models, a different kind of ai interface that processes continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals. the goal is to capture the texture of human communication, like interruptions and mid-thought corrections, in near real time. she framed it as an early step, not a finished product, and gave no release date.

murati also addressed the november 2023 openai board crisis, when she briefly became interim ceo after sam altman was fired. she said her decisions felt clear at the time, focused on protecting the mission and team, and that the company would have imploded without her involvement. in hindsight, she would have pushed for more information and transparency. she avoided saying whether she trusts altman now, instead raising concerns about the concentration of power in ai. she argued that too much attention goes to individual character and too little to governance, noting that good people can make bad calls and well-intentioned organizations can drift.

on talent departures from thinking machines, murati downplayed the exits, saying building a frontier lab compresses years of volatility into months. she acknowledged that huge compensation packages grab attention but suggested they are not the whole story. when asked about ai's future, she rejected both dystopian and utopian predictions, saying the current period will determine the outcome. she warned that if humans take their hands off the wheel too soon, the future will look very different and not better.

why it matters: murati's interaction models point to a shift from turn-based ai to systems that understand real-time human communication, which could change how people work with ai tools.

source: techcrunch ai: mira murati steps back into the spotlight, carefully