Mira Murati is an engineer and technology executive best known for serving as chief technology officer of OpenAI and later co founding Thinking Machines Lab, where she is chief executive.
Her career has moved through electric vehicles, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Before starting her own AI company, she worked at Tesla, led product and engineering at Leap Motion and spent more than six years at OpenAI.
Where is Mira Murati from?
Murati was born in Albania. She later studied in the United States as a Davis UWC Scholar.
She completed a dual degree program through Colby College and Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, earning an undergraduate degree from Colby and a bachelor of engineering from Dartmouth.
Dartmouth awarded her an honorary Doctor of Science degree in 2024 for her work in artificial intelligence and engineering.
Her work at Tesla
Before becoming known for AI, Murati worked at Tesla Motors. Dartmouth says she worked on vehicle products including the Model X and on early Autopilot related systems.
Murati later said her experience with self driving technology helped deepen her interest in artificial intelligence.
Leap Motion
After Tesla, Murati moved to Leap Motion, the company known for hand tracking technology used in virtual and augmented reality.
She led product and engineering work there before joining OpenAI.
When did Mira Murati join OpenAI?
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018. Over the following years she held increasingly senior roles across hardware strategy, product, deployment, research and safety.
She eventually became chief technology officer, overseeing research, product development and deployment.
What did she work on at OpenAI?
Dartmouth credits Murati with leadership across products and systems including ChatGPT, DALL E and Codex. Its current biography also lists GPT 4, Sora and OpenAI’s o series reasoning models among the work she helped oversee.
Her role was broader than product launches. She also managed reinforcement learning and safety research teams and worked on how OpenAI deployed new systems to the public.
Why did Mira Murati leave OpenAI?
Murati announced her departure in September 2024 after more than six years at OpenAI.
Reuters reported her exit during a period of major leadership changes at the company. Murati said publicly that she was leaving to create time and space for her own exploration.
Thinking Machines Lab
Murati went on to co found Thinking Machines Lab, an AI research and product company focused on systems that people and organisations can customise and train around their own needs.
The company came out of stealth in February 2025 with a team that included researchers and engineers from OpenAI, Meta and other leading AI labs.
Thinking Machines later raised a US$2 billion seed round at a reported US$12 billion post money valuation, making it one of the most heavily funded new AI companies ever launched.
For the company, its products and funding history, see our Thinking Machines Lab explainer.
What has Thinking Machines built?
The company’s first major product was Tinker, a managed training API that lets developers fine tune AI models without building the distributed computing infrastructure themselves.
Thinking Machines has also released open weight Inkling models and announced a long term partnership with NVIDIA involving at least one gigawatt of next generation Vera Rubin computing systems.
What is Murati’s role now?
Murati is co founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab. She is responsible for the company’s overall direction while also remaining one of its most visible technical and public leaders.
Her current work is centred on making advanced AI more customisable and interactive rather than offering one fixed model for every user.
Why is Mira Murati important in AI?
Murati is unusual because her career spans both the engineering side and the product side of modern AI.
At OpenAI, she helped turn research systems into products used by millions of people. At Thinking Machines, she is now trying to build a new company around the next stage of model training and human interaction.
Her ability to recruit senior researchers and raise unusually large amounts of capital also makes her one of the most influential founders in the current AI market.
What this profile does not include
We have left out unverified net worth estimates and private family details that are commonly repeated on biography sites without reliable sourcing.
This profile focuses on the parts of Murati’s background that can be checked through her university, her companies and established reporting.
For more profiles of founders and technology leaders, see Holyprofweb’s People section.