Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Muratis new AI venture, Thinking Machines Lab, has gained two new prominent advisers: Bob McGrew, previously OpenAIs chief research officer, and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher behind many of the companys more transformative innovations.Thinking Machines Labs website was quietly updated with McGrew and Radfords names sometime in March.
A spokesperson for the startup didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.McGrew joined OpenAI as a member of the technical staff in 2017 and was promoted to VP of research in 2018 before assuming the role of chief research officer.
He left in September 2024, saying at the time that he intended to take a break.
Radford, who departed OpenAI late last year to pursue independent research after close to a decade at the company, was the lead author of OpenAIs seminal research paper on generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs).
GPTs underpin OpenAIs most popular products, including the companys AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT.
Radford also worked on several models in the companys GPT series as well as the speech recognition model Whisper and DALL-E, OpenAIs image-generating model.Thinking Machines Lab has so far been vague about its research agenda and product roadmap.
But in an announcement in February, the startup said that it intends to build tooling to make AI work for [peoples] unique needs and goals and to create AI systems that are more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable than those currently available.Murati is heading up Thinking Machines Lab as CEO.
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the companys chief scientist, and Barret Zoph, who led model post-training at OpenAI, is the CTO.Murati left OpenAI last October after six years at the company.
She came to OpenAI as VP of applied AI and partnerships.
After being promoted to CTO in 2022, Murati led the companys work onChatGPT, DALL-E, and the code-generating systemCodex, which powered early versions ofGitHubs Copilotprogramming assistant.At one point, Murati was said to be in talks to raise over $100 million from unnamed VC firms for Thinking Machines Lab, which counts dozens of employees from top AI labs, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind, among its ranks.