Thinking Machines Lab, former Operannai CTO Mira Murati’s new AI venture, has acquired two new, well-known advisors. This is Bob McGrew, former Chief Research Officer at Openai, and Alec Radford, a former Openai researcher behind many more transformative innovations.
The Thinking Machines Lab website was quietly updated in March with the names McGrew and Radford. The startup spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
McGrew joined Openai in 2017 as a member of the technical staff and was promoted to Vice President of Research in 2018 before taking on the role of Best Research Director. He left in September 2024 and said at the time he was planning to take a “break.”
Launching Openai at the end of last year and pursuing independent research with the company nearly a decade later, Radford was the lead author of Openai’s inventive research paper on Generation Pretraining Devices (GPTs). GPTS supports Openai’s most popular products, including ChatGpt, the company’s AI-powered chatbot platform. Radford also worked on several models from the company’s GPT series, whispers of speech recognition models, and Openai’s image generation model, Dall-E.
Thinking Machines Lab has so far been vague about its research agenda and product roadmap. However, in a February announcement, the startup said it was “to build tools to work with AI.” [people’s] To create AI systems that are “widely understood, customizable, and generally competent” than those currently available.
Murati leads Thinking Machine Lab as CEO. Openai co-founder John Schulman is the company’s chief scientist, and Barret Zoph, who led the model after training at Openai, is CTO.
Murati left the company for six years in October last year. She came to Openai as the applied vice president of AI and Partnerships. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, Murati led the company’s work on ChatGpt, Dall-E, and Code Generation System Codex, which features early versions of Github’s Copilot programming assistant.
At one point, Murati is said to be in talks to raise more than $100 million from an unknown VC company to count dozens of employees from top AI labs, including Openai and Google Deepmind, in its ranks.
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