Mira Murati, who left her role as chief technology officer at OpenAI last September, has launched a new artificial intelligence startup called Thinking Machines Lab, adding to the growing number of ventures in the competitive AI sector.

The company aims to "make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable," according to a blog post published on Tuesday. Thinking Machines Lab also stated it would freely share its technologies with outside researchers and companies, embracing an "open source" approach.

Murati, 36, has assembled an impressive team including OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as chief scientist and Barret Zoph, OpenAI's former chief research officer, as chief technology officer. Reuters reports that approximately two-thirds of the company's 30-person team comprises former OpenAI employees.

"While current systems excel at programming and mathematics, we're building AI that can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum of applications," the startup said in its announcement.

Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 and led the development of several breakthrough products including ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E, and the code-generating system Codex. She briefly served as interim chief executive officer during Sam Altman's surprise ouster in November 2023.

When leaving OpenAI, Murati said she was stepping away to "create the time and space to do my own exploration," without providing specific details about her future plans.

According to multiple reports, Murati has been in talks with venture capital firms to raise over £100 million in funding, though the company has not confirmed any investment details.

AI safety appears to be a core focus for Thinking Machines Lab. The company stated it plans to prevent misuse of its models, share best practices for building safe AI systems, and support external research on alignment by sharing code, datasets, and model specifications.

"We'll focus on understanding how our systems create genuine value in the real world," Thinking Machines Lab wrote. "The most important breakthroughs often come from rethinking our objectives, not just optimizing existing metrics."

Murati joins other former OpenAI executives who have launched AI startups, including those behind Anthropic and Safe Superintelligence, both of which have attracted former OpenAI researchers and substantial funding.

Before her time at OpenAI, Murati worked as a senior product manager at Tesla, where she was involved with early versions of the Autopilot driver-assistance software. She also served as vice president of product and engineering at Leap Motion, a startup developing hand-tracking motion sensors.

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