Mira Murati, OpenAI’s Former Chief Technology Officer, Starts Her Own Company

Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI who unexpectedly left the company in September, has helped found a new artificial intelligence start-up called Thinking Machines Lab, adding to the wave of young companies that have been formed in the race to lead A.I.

Thinking Machines Lab aims to “make A.I. systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable,” according to a blog post from the new company. It said it would freely share its technologies with outside researchers and companies, a practice known as “open source.”

Thinking Machines Lab declined to say if it has raised money.

Ms. Murati, 36, was among OpenAI’s top executives and researchers who left the company after the surprise ouster of its chief executive, Sam Altman, in November 2023 and his reinstatement five days later. Some of them had clashed with Mr. Altman over the direction of OpenAI and its philosophy over A.I., a powerful technology that has implications for jobs and society.

Other former OpenAI executives, including the co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, have since created their own A.I. companies. Their start-ups, along with giant companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft, are part of the global race to build increasingly powerful A.I. technologies.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)

OpenAI captured the world’s imagination in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, an online chatbot that could answer questions, write term papers, generate computer code and mimic human conversation. Mr. Altman became a face of the A.I. movement.

But in November 2023, four OpenAI board members ousted him, saying they could not trust him with the company’s plan to one day create a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. Ms. Murati, who joined OpenAI in 2018, was named to lead the company after Mr. Altman’s removal, but she rejected the role two days later. She stayed on at OpenAI after Mr. Altman returned.

The Times reported last year that Ms. Murati had written a private memo to Mr. Altman in the months before his ouster, raising questions about his management and sharing the memo with OpenAI’s board. A lawyer for Ms. Murati denied the claims at the time.

When she left OpenAI, Ms. Murati said she was stepping away to “create the time and space to do my own exploration.” She did not provide details.