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Mira Murati, the 36-year-old engineer who helped build ChatGPT during her time as chief technology officer at OpenAI, is now leading one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched startups. Her company, Thinking Machines Lab, launched its first product, Tinker, a tool that lets researchers and developers fine-tune AI models without managing costly infrastructure.
Founded in early 2025, Thinking Machines Lab quickly attracted attention, raising $2 billion in seed funding at a $12 billion valuation. Murati assembled a top-tier team of about 50 engineers and researchers from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other AI labs.
Murati says the goal is to “make what is otherwise a frontier capability accessible to all,” enabling researchers, businesses, and hobbyists to customize AI models for specialized tasks. Tinker supports both supervised learning and reinforcement learning, allowing users to download and run their fine-tuned models anywhere.
Unlike ChatGPT-style chatbots, Tinker is designed for researchers, developers, and businesses who want to adapt large AI models to specific tasks without managing costly GPU clusters. Tinker offers “full control over the training loop” while simplifying distributed training.
For now, Tinker is free to use via an API, with the company vetting applicants for access. Paid plans are expected later.
The API leverages LoRA (low-rank adaptation) for efficient fine-tuning and provides low-level primitives such as forward_backward and sample. The company also released an open-source Tinker Cookbook with modern implementations of post-training methods.
Researchers from universities like Berkeley, Princeton, and Stanford praise Tinker for letting them focus on research instead of hardware overhead.
Her leadership has already been tested: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly tried to lure away her team with offers worth hundreds of millions, in some cases over $1 billion. Not a single employee accepted, signaling strong loyalty to Murati and her company’s mission.
Murati, who was born in Albania and studied both math and mechanical engineering, joined OpenAI in 2018 and rose to become CTO, overseeing the development of ChatGPT, DALL·E, Codex, and Sora. She briefly served as OpenAI’s interim CEO in 2023 during a leadership shake-up.
