Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI, has successfully recruited two high-profile leaders from her old company as advisors for her new startup, Thinking Machines Lab. Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI’s chief research officer, and Alec Radford, a key former OpenAI researcher integral to some of the company’s most notable breakthroughs, recently joined Murati’s advisory board. Their names were added to Thinking Machines Lab’s official website quietly sometime last month.
McGrew began his tenure at OpenAI as a member of technical staff in 2017, rose through the ranks to vice president of research the following year, and ultimately became chief research officer. Last September, he stepped down, stating that he was ready for some time away from the industry.
Radford dedicated nearly ten years to OpenAI and was lead author of the influential research paper that introduced generative pre-trained transformers (GPT)—the underlying technology behind ChatGPT and numerous other successful OpenAI products. During his tenure, he contributed significantly to several notable projects, including the speech recognition system Whisper and the image-generation platform DALL-E. Radford left OpenAI at the end of last year to pursue independent research.
Although Thinking Machines Lab remains discreet about its specific goals and strategic roadmap, it previously announced in February its ambition to create tools that tailor artificial intelligence to better meet individual needs. The company also aims to build AI systems which are more transparent, customizable, and broadly capable compared to current offerings.
Murati serves as CEO of Thinking Machines Lab. Her leadership team includes OpenAI co-founder John Schulman, who serves as chief scientist, and Barret Zoph, another OpenAI veteran, as CTO. Murati departed OpenAI last October after six notable years with the organization. Initially hired as VP of applied AI and partnerships, Murati advanced to CTO in 2022, leading critical projects such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Codex—the latter powering the early iterations of GitHub’s Copilot programming assistant.
Earlier reports indicated that Murati was engaged in discussions to raise over $100 million from venture capital firms for Thinking Machines Lab. Her company has recruited dozens of experts previously associated with top-tier AI labs including OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
