Mira Murati

Mira Murati, born in Vlorë, Albania, trained as a mechanical engineer at Dartmouth and worked on the Model X at Tesla and at the hand-tracking startup Leap Motion before joining OpenAI in 2018 to run applied AI and partnerships. Named chief technology officer in May 2022, Murati oversaw research, product and safety teams through the launches of DALL-E, ChatGPT, GPT-4 and Sora.

When the board fired Sam Altman on 17 November 2023 it made Murati interim CEO. Three days later the board named Emmett Shear in Murati's place, and Murati signed the staff letter demanding Altman's return. The roles in that episode are still disputed. In a deposition taken in October 2025, Ilya Sutskever testified that most of the screenshots in his 52-page memo to the board came from Murati. In a recorded deposition played at the Musk v. Altman trial in May 2026, Murati said, "My concern was about Sam saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person," and that during the crisis the company was at "catastrophic risk of falling apart." Altman has described the firing as a governance failure by well-meaning people, himself included.

Murati left OpenAI on 25 September 2024 to "do my own exploration," and in February 2025 launched Thinking Machines Lab with John Schulman as chief scientist and some 30 researchers, most from OpenAI. It raised about 2 billion dollars at a 12 billion dollar valuation in July 2025 and released Tinker, a fine-tuning service, that October. In January 2026 co-founders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz returned to OpenAI; Murati told staff Zoph had been let go for "unethical conduct," concerns that OpenAI's Fidji Simo told OpenAI staff the company did not share. On 15 July 2026 the company released Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter open-weight model, which it said was "not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed."