Thinking Machines, led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, raises $2B in seed funding – News

Generative artificial intelligence pioneer Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab Inc. said today it has raised $2 billion, in what is likely to be one of the largest seed funding rounds ever disclosed.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and saw participation from a host of other illustrious investors, including Nvidia Corp., Accel, ServiceNow Inc., Cisco Ventures, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Jane Street

Thinking Machines, which was founded by its Chief Executive Murati in February, had reportedly been holding talks with investors since April, and had originally been talking about a $10 billion valuation, but that number has since shot up, and it’s now valued at $12 billion, it said today.

The fact that such a young startup, which has not yet announced any products, was able to raise one of the largest seed rounds in Silicon Valley’s history, underscores not only the massive enthusiasm investors have for promising new AI companies, but also Murati’s personal reputation as one of the industry’s leading lights.

Murati formerly served as chief technology officer at OpenAI and oversaw a number of advances during her time at the company, including the development of ChatGPT and the company’s image generation model, DALL-E. She also played a key role in the development of OpenAI’s GPT-4o reasoning model, which is more humanlike in the way it takes time to research and consider its responses to user prompts.

In a post on X that announced today’s round, Murati dropped a few hints about what the company’s first product might be, saying it will unveil what it’s working on in the “next couple months.” She promised it will include a “significant open source offering” that will make it useful for researchers building custom AI models. “Soon, we’ll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems,” she said.

That doesn’t necessarily suggest Thinking Machines plans to launch a fully open-source AI model, as some of OpenAI’s rivals have done in an effort to unseat the ChatGPT maker from its pole position in the AI industry.

When she founded the company in February, Murati also spoke about “infrastructure quality” as being a top priority, and so that may be another focus of its work. She said at the time that “research productivity is paramount and heavily depends on the reliability, efficiency and ease of use of infrastructure,” and added that the company aims to “build things correctly for the long haul.”

In addition, she also talked about how the AI models she’s working on won’t be specifically tailored to perform certain tasks, such as programming or math. Instead, she is designing models that will be able to “adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise” and fulfill a broader spectrum of applications.

Murati is a talented AI developer, but she’s not alone in driving Thinking Machines. She has also managed to convince a number of her former colleagues at OpenAI to join her at the company, including the research executive Barret Zoph, who serves as its CTO, and John Schulman, a co-founder of the ChatGPT developer, who has taken on the role of chief research officer.

According to Murati, the company is now looking to expand its team, eying talent that has a proven track record of building successful AI products from the ground up.

Having invested billions of dollars into the startup, investors will be hoping that Thinking Machines’ talented team now have the resources they need to catch up with, and perhaps one day even surpass industry stalwarts such as OpenAI, Google LLC and its DeepMind unit, and Anthropic PBC.

However, the startup will be keenly aware that it’s facing an uphill struggle, as those rivals have all amassed many more billions of dollars and continue to push the needle as they race to try and achieve the ultimate goal of artificial general intelligence, or machines that surpass humans in their thinking.

Photo: IBLNews