Textbook of AI

1988–, AI executive

Mira Murati is an Albanian-American AI executive who served as Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI from May 2022 to September 2024. Before OpenAI, she held engineering and product leadership positions at Tesla (where she worked on Model X and the early Autopilot programme), Leap Motion (VR/AR hardware), and Goldman Sachs.

As OpenAI CTO, Murati led the productisation of nearly every major release of OpenAI's most consequential period: GPT-3.5, ChatGPT (November 2022, which reached 100 million users in two months, the fastest-growing consumer application in history at the time), GPT-4 (March 2023), GPT-4o (May 2024 with native multimodality), DALL-E 2 and 3, Voice Engine, Sora (text-to-video, February 2024), and the o1 reasoning-model line. She managed the engineering, applied-science, product and design teams that turned OpenAI's research into shipped consumer and enterprise products.

During the November 2023 OpenAI board crisis, Murati was briefly named interim CEO over the weekend before Sam Altman's reinstatement. She subsequently played a key role in the negotiated reconstitution of OpenAI's board and leadership.

In September 2024 Murati announced she was leaving OpenAI to start a new company. Thinking Machines Lab launched publicly in February 2025 with a USD 2 billion seed round at a USD 12 billion valuation, organised as a public benefit corporation focused on alternative training paradigms and tooling for AI development; its first product, Tinker, shipped in October 2025. The departure from OpenAI was part of a broader exodus of senior researchers including Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike and several research-team leads through 2024.

Murati was educated at Dartmouth (Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering, 2012). She has been a relatively private figure for someone of her organisational influence, with comparatively few public lectures or interviews, a counterpoint to the more visible OpenAI personalities of the same era.