Mira Murati is not a natural creature of the convention scene. As CTO of OpenAI, she was present but rarely the public face of the company. As CEO of her company, Thinking Machines Lab, she was even harder to find. So when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday — her first major media appearance in about 18 months — she was worth paying attention to, even if she was careful not to say much.
The timing makes sense. Thinking Machines spent the better part of a year and a half operating largely in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers, and shipping a product; Tinkeran API for fine-tuning open source AI models.
Meanwhile, companies competing for the same talent, clients and headlines have become more ubiquitous. OpenAI — where Murati spent six years, including two as CTO — is constantly in the news cycle. Anthropic’s momentum is all anyone can talk about right now. And xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, has folded into SpaceX ahead of its massive public offering, creating its own gravitational pull on attention and investment. In this environment, staying upside down has diminishing returns. at some point, you have to make some noise to remind the market that you exist.
Murati used the Bloomberg appearance to do just that and not much more. He previewed what Thinking Machines calls “interaction models,” which he described as a fundamentally different kind of AI interface. Instead of the pivoting, instant and responsive dynamics that define most AI products today, he told Emily Chang in the interview, the company’s models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text and video at 200-millisecond intervals. The idea is that they can understand the texture of human communication — interruptions, mid-thought corrections, even pauses for thought — in something closer to real time. But Murati was careful to frame it as a first step, not a finished product, and declined to put a specific release date on anything.
She also answered questions about the episode that brought her most clearly into the public eye: the chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and became interim CEO. (Within OpenAI, it was called “the blip.”) Murati said she felt clear about her decisions at every moment—that protecting the mission and the team was the means by which the choices seemed obvious, even when the situation seemed to be falling apart from the outside. He said the company would have “exploded” if not for its involvement in that strange five-day period and its immediate aftermath. But he recognized that clarity of intent is not the same thing as clarity about consequences. In retrospect, he said, he would have pushed harder for more information and a real transition plan. What he didn’t say, at least not directly, is whether he thinks things turned out well.
Asked if she still trusted her former boss, she sidestepped the question, steering the conversation toward a larger concern she returned to several times: the concentration of subsequent decisions in too few hands — not just at OpenAI but across the industry. Her concern, she said, is less about the character of any leader (though she acknowledged that matters) and more about the absence of structural checks. Good people make bad calls. Well-intentioned organizations get carried away. Too much attention has been paid to virtue and too little to governance, he suggested.
Chang also gently pressed her on the departures of several high-profile researchers from Thinking Machines in recent months, a topic Murati has largely avoided publicly and downplayed on Thursday. First, he said, building a frontier AI lab from scratch compresses years of normal organizational instability into months. He also acknowledged that compensation — the nine-figure packages that have become the main currency in the war for AI talent — captures people’s imaginations, but suggested it’s usually not the whole story. To some laughter from the audience, she said of her own competitive instincts: “When I wake up in the morning, I don’t think about how to kill the competitor.”
Of course, Chang asked what’s next for AI in general, including the people that AI companies once said would be empowered by AI, but who have more recently been scared off by talk of mass job displacement, not to mention a future where AI is used to create chemical weapons.
Murati, who was born in Albania and speaks with a slight Eastern European accent, was measured in her response. He pushed back against the framework of inevitable dystopia or inevitable utopia, arguing that neither outcome is predetermined and that the period we’re in right now is what will determine the course of things. However, he said, if people take their hands off the wheel too soon, the future will look very different and not better.
Correction: This story originally misstated the length of Murati’s tenure as OpenAI’s CTO.
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