Mira Murati is not a natural on the conference stage. As OpenAI’s CTO, she was present but rarely appeared as the public face of the company. As CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, she was much harder to find. So when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday — her first major media appearance in about 18 months — it was worth noting, even if she was careful not to say too much.
The timing makes sense. Thinking Machines has spent the better part of a year and a half in the background raising capital, hiring researchers, and launching its Tinker product, an API for fine-tuning open source AI models.
Meanwhile, companies competing for the same talent, customers, and headlines have become increasingly widespread. OpenAI, where Murati served as CTO for six years, is constantly in the news. Anthropic’s momentum is all anyone can talk about right now. And Elon Musk’s AI venture, xAI, was incorporated into SpaceX ahead of an expected large initial public offering, giving it a boost in attracting attention and investment. In that environment, keeping your head down means diminishing returns. At some point, you need to make some noise to remind the market you exist.
Murati used his Bloomberg appearance to do exactly that and nothing more. She previewed what Thinking Machines calls an “interaction model,” which she describes as a fundamentally different kind of AI interface. Rather than the turn-based, immediate and responsive approach that defines most AI products today, the company’s model is designed to process continuous streams of audio, text and video at 200-millisecond intervals, she told interviewer Emily Chang. The idea is that the texture of human communication – pauses, mid-thought corrections, and even pauses in thought – can be captured in a way that is closer to real-time. But Murati was careful to frame it as a first step rather than a finished product, and declined to give a specific release date.
She also answered questions about the episode that first catapulted her into the public eye: the chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO. Inside OpenAI, it came to be called a “blip”. Murati felt clear about his decisions at every moment. He said protecting the mission and the team, even when things appear to be falling apart from the outside, is a throughline that makes the choice feel clear. She said the company would have “imploded” had it not been for her involvement in that strange five-day period and its immediate aftermath. But she acknowledged that clarity of intent is different from clarity of outcome. Looking back, she said she would have worked harder for more information, better transition planning and more transparency. What she hasn’t said, at least not directly, is whether she thinks things have worked out well.
When asked if she still trusted her former boss, she dodged the question and steered the conversation toward a larger concern she’d repeated several times: that consequential decisions, not just at OpenAI but across the industry, were concentrated in too few hands. She said she was more concerned about the lack of structural checks than about the character of individual leaders (though she acknowledged that they are important). Good people make bad calls. Well-intentioned organizations drift. Too much attention, she suggested, was paid to virtue and too little to governance.
Chang has also politely pressed her on the departures of several high-profile researchers at Thinking Machines in recent months, a topic that Murati has largely avoided publicly and which she downplayed on Thursday. First, building a state-of-the-art AI lab from scratch can compress years of normal organizational volatility into a few months, she said. She also acknowledged that compensation, a nine-figure package that has become standard currency in the war for AI talent, captures people’s imagination, but suggested that’s usually not the whole story. Talking about her competitive instinct, she said, “When I wake up in the morning, I can’t think of how to kill my rival,” making some audience members laugh.
Unsurprisingly, Chang has broadly questioned what’s next for AI, including humans, who once said AI companies would be empowered by AI but have recently been frightened by talk of mass job displacement, not to mention a future where AI is used to make chemical weapons.
Murati’s response, who was born in Albania and speaks with a slight Eastern European accent, was appreciated. She pushed back against the framing of either an inevitable dystopia or an inevitable utopia, arguing that neither outcome is predetermined, and that the moment we find ourselves in now will determine which direction things will go. Nonetheless, she said during an interview (not for the first time) that if humans take their hands off the steering wheel too quickly, the future will look very different, and it won’t be better.
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