Former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati has announced her new startup.
The mentioned startup will operate in the artificial intelligence industry. There is obviously no sensation or surprise in this, given Mira Murati’s involvement in the mentioned industry. Whether a new player in the area of artificial intelligence will become one of OpenAI’s main competitors is still unknown, but there is a corresponding possibility, even if only on a hypothetical level as of today.
The new startup is called Thinking Machines Lab. In this case, the goal is to develop tools that will make artificial intelligence work for people’s unique needs and goals. Also, as part of the company’s activities, it is expected that machine intelligence systems will be elaborated, which will be more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable compared to existing systems of the appropriate technological class.
Mira Murati heads the new startup as chief executive officer. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the company’s chief scientist, and Barret Zoph, OpenAI’s ex-chief research officer, is the chief technology officer.
The Thinking Machines Lab noted that the capabilities of artificial intelligence have advanced dramatically, but at the same time, the main gaps have remained. In a message posted on the startup’s blog, it was underlined that understanding of frontier machine intelligence systems lags behind the rapidly advancing capabilities. It was also highlighted in the relevant context that knowledge about how artificial intelligence systems are trained is concentrated in top research laboratories, which limits both the public discourse on AI and people’s ability to effectively use digital intelligence. It was noted separately that, despite the significant potential, it is still difficult for people to customize the mentioned systems to their specific needs and values.
The Thinking Machines Lab plans to focus on building multimodal artificial intelligence systems that work collaboratively with humans and can adapt to the full range of human expertise and enable a broader range of apps.
In a message posted on the startup’s blog, it was noted that it is developing machine intelligence models at the frontier of capabilities in areas such as science and programming. Also in this context, it was underlined that eventually, the most advanced artificial intelligence models will unlock the most transformative apps and benefits such as enabling novel scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs.
One of the main principles of the Thinking Machines Lab will be the safety of machine intelligence. The startup stated its intention to contribute to safety by preventing the misuse of models developed by it, sharing best practices and recipes on how to build safe artificial intelligence systems with the industry, and supporting external research on alignment by sharing code, datasets, and model specifications.
In a blog post published by Thinking Machines Lab, it was noted that the company will focus on understanding how its machine intelligence systems generate genuine value in the real world. In the relevant context, it was also highlighted separately that the most important breakthroughs often occur as a result of rethinking objectives, rather than simply optimizing existing metrics.
Mira Murati left OpenAI in October. She worked for this company, which developed ChatGPT, for six years. In October, she stated that the decision to step away was made to do her own exploration.
Mira Murati joined the OpenAI team in 2018 as vice president of applied artificial intelligence and partnerships. After being promoted to chief technology officer in 2022, she led the company’s work on ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E, and the code-generating system Codex, which powered early versions of GitHub’s Copilot programming assistant.
Mira Murati was also briefly the chief executive officer of OpenAI after the sudden firing of Sam Altman. It’s worth noting that Sam Altman called her his closest ally.
For several months, rumors have been actively circulating that Mira Murati is hiring high-profile artificial intelligence researchers and staffers for an AI venture. Thinking Machines Lab’s blog lists 29 employees from OpenAI, Character AI, and Google DeepMind, among other top companies.
The startup is actively hiring machine learning scientists and engineers, and a research program manager.
According to rumors, Mira Murati was in talks to raise more than $100 million from unnamed venture capital firms. Thinking Machines Lab has not yet confirmed or denied this information.
Before OpenAI, Mira Murati worked for Tesla for three years as a senior product manager of the Model X, the automaker’s crossover SUV, during which this company released early versions of Autopilot, its artificial intelligence-enabled driver-assistance software. She was also vice president of product and engineering at Leap Motion, a startup building hand- and finger-tracking motion sensors for personal computers.
Mira Murati has joined the growing list of former OpenAI execs launching startups, including rivals such as Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and Anthropic.
It is worth noting that the global artificial intelligence industry has recently witnessed a steady process of increasing competition. The number of companies operating in this dimension of the technology space is growing rapidly. The corresponding tendency is as natural as possible. Artificial intelligence is actually the most advanced technology of modernity. AI has already demonstrated impressive abilities to process huge amounts of information, including in the framework of an analytical approach to relevant cognitive operations, and the generation of original content in the form of text, audio, video, and images. The practice of using certain configurations of artificial intelligence as a working tool is also gradually scaling up. Moreover, there is a high probability that machine intelligence will eventually become a new production means. The implementation of this potential scenario will have a fundamental impact on the global economy. Also, the most ambitious futurological forecasts provide that artificial intelligence in the process of its technological evolution will surpass the human mind in terms of cognitive abilities. This means that AI has the potential to make significant progress and make certain breakthroughs in understanding the world as a cosmological space of a global being, not limited by the territory of human existence. It is possible that artificial intelligence will become a kind of new form of mind capable of scientific discoveries previously inaccessible to anyone and nothing. All of the listed AI opportunities and prospects indicate that the growth of competition in the digital intelligence industry is likely to only intensify. It is worth noting that the area of artificial intelligence has already become one of the planes of geopolitical rivalry. The ability to develop AI is likely to determine the position of countries in the international arena in the foreseeable future.
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