Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI researchers. The company has raised a record-breaking $2 billion seed round, valuing the fledgling company at $12 billion.
Andreessen-Horowitz led the funding round, which included Nvidia Accel, Cisco and AMD, among others. The massive investment reflects both the fierce competition to build advanced AI systems and the high value placed on top AI talent. This is the largest seed round in history.
Thinking Machines’ CEO Mira Murati is the former chief technology officer of OpenAI. She stepped down from that position last September. Her cofounders include John Schulman, an OpenAI computer scientist who worked with ChatGPT, Barrett Zoph, the former vice president of research, Lilian Weng who worked in AI safety and robotics, Andrew Tulloch who worked with pretraining and reasoning, and Luke Metz who worked with post-training. The first time that Thinking Machines Lab has confirmed the team publicly, it did so on Tuesday.
Murati stated in a post at X that Thinking Machines was developing multimodal AI which will interact with humans through “conversation, through sight, and through the messy ways we collaborate.” The company will release its product within the next couple of months. She noted that it will include a significant amount of open source code and will be useful to researchers and startups who are developing custom models.
In recent months, the drama reached a whole new level as talk about AI firms like OpenAI approaching human- or superhuman levels of AI intensified. (Thinking Machines Lab is notably quiet in this regard–at least for now).
Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg also shook up the industry when he lured top researchers to a superintelligence lab by promising them multimillion-dollar salaries. Zuckerberg has been successful in bringing over several OpenAI researchers to the new project. It is highly likely that the cofounders of Thinking Machines were approached due to their expertise and prominence. The company declined to comment, however.
