Just 10 days after launch, young AI startup is valued at $9 billion

Mira Murati's AI startup Thinking Machines Lab is aiming to raise $1 billion at a valuation of around $9 billion, Business Insider reported.

Thinking Machines Lab's $1 billion funding round is still in progress and details are subject to change.

The $9 billion valuation is unusually high for a startup less than a year old, but investors are eager to back AI startups, especially those founded by former OpenAI employees.

CEO Mira Murati launched Thinking Machines Lab on February 18.

Murati spent six and a half years at OpenAI, where she served as chief technology officer, working on ChatGPT and other AI research initiatives. She was appointed interim CEO in November 2023 after the OpenAI board abruptly fired Sam Altman, a move that caused turmoil at the company. After Altman was reinstated as CEO, Murati resumed her role as CTO.

What Murati would do after leaving OpenAI last year has been a hot topic of discussion in Silicon Valley in recent months, with few details until Thinking Machines Lab emerged from stealth mode last week. On February 18, Murati officially launched the startup, with about 30 top engineers and researchers from competitors.

In a blog post, Murati positioned the startup as an artificial intelligence research and product lab focused on making AI more accessible. “To bridge the gap, we’re building the Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more broadly understood, customizable, and generalizable,” Murati said.

Murati has recruited a long list of AI engineers and researchers from her former company OpenAI, as well as Meta and Anthropic. Several of Murati’s former colleagues, including John Schulman, who co-led the creation of ChatGPT; Jonathan Lachman, a former special projects lead at OpenAI; Barret Zoph, one of ChatGPT’s co-creators; and Alexander Kirillov, who worked closely with Murati on ChatGPT’s speech mode, are also at the Thinking Machines Lab.

Murati is one of a handful of former OpenAI executives who have started their own companies. Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, left the company in May 2024 and founded Safe Superintelligence shortly thereafter. Dario and Daniela Amodei also worked at OpenAI and founded Anthropic in 2021.

The Thinking Machines Lab focuses on building multimodal systems that work collaboratively with people and can adapt to the entire spectrum of human expertise and enable a wide range of applications.

The Thinking Machines Lab is building models at the edge of possibilities in areas like science and programming. Ultimately, the most advanced models will unlock transformative applications and benefits, such as enabling new scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs.

AI safety is a core principle of Thinking Machines Lab’s work. The company contributes to safety by preventing misuse of the models it releases, sharing best practices and recipes for building safe AI systems with the industry, and supporting external research on the connection by sharing code, datasets, and model specifications.

Source: https://www.baogiaothong.vn/chi-sau-10-ngay-ra-mat-cong-ty-khoi-nghiep-ai-non-tre-duoc-dinh-gia-9-ty-usd-192250227210217439.htm