Mira Murati
Most boards now treat AI as a strategic priority without a grounded view of how the systems setting that pace are actually built. Executive advice tends to swing between technical detail no operator needs and speculation no fiduciary can act on. The view from inside a frontier lab is rarely in the room with the people who most need it.
Mira Murati is the founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab and former CTO of OpenAI, offering senior leaders an unfiltered view of how frontier AI systems are built and governed inside the labs setting the pace.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Mira Murati
- She led the teams that built ChatGPT, DALL-E and Sora at OpenAI. Few speakers can describe frontier AI development from the operational seat; most describe it from the outside.
- She is the active founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, currently raising capital, hiring researchers, building infrastructure and shipping product against the same labs leaders read about in the news. The view she offers is current.
- She has spoken publicly on AI governance from the position of someone who has actually shipped the systems being regulated, including at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center. That changes the credibility of the conversation in a boardroom.
- Thinking Machines Lab is structured as a public benefit corporation. The trade-offs between commercial pressure and societal responsibility are written into how the company is governed, which is rare among frontier AI labs.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, an AI public benefit corporation that raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation in July 2025, the largest seed round in venture capital history.
- Former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, with leadership across research, product and safety teams behind ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex, Sora and GPT-4.
- Briefly named interim CEO of OpenAI during the November 2023 board transition.
- Senior product roles at Tesla on the Model X programme and at Leap Motion before joining OpenAI in 2018.
- Recognised in TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI (2024), TIME 100 Next (2023), Fortune’s 100 Most Powerful Women in Business (2023) and CNBC Changemakers (2026).
- Honorary Doctor of Science from Dartmouth College (2024); Bachelor of Engineering from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and Bachelor of Arts from Colby College.
Biography
The decisions about how today’s frontier AI systems would be deployed were made inside small research labs, largely closed to outside scrutiny. The most consequential of those decisions, around ChatGPT, DALL-E, Sora and the GPT series, were made in rooms most boards still cannot see into. Mira Murati was in those rooms.
She was Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI from 2022 until 2024, leading the research, product and safety teams behind the systems that brought generative AI into mainstream use. Her tenure included the November 2023 board episode, when she was named interim CEO during the brief removal of Sam Altman, returning to the CTO role within days. She left OpenAI in September 2024, by which point the products her teams had shipped were in everyday use by hundreds of millions of people.
In February 2025 she founded Thinking Machines Lab, a public benefit corporation based in San Francisco. The company raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation in July 2025, led by Andreessen Horowitz with Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, Accel and Jane Street participating. It was the largest seed round in venture capital history. The lab’s first product, Tinker, launched in October 2025 as an API that lets researchers fine-tune frontier open-weight models without managing the underlying compute. Princeton, Stanford and Berkeley were among the early users.
For senior audiences, this is unusual access: a builder’s view of frontier AI from someone still building. Murati has written for Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, on the language and creativity of large models. She has spoken publicly on AI governance at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center. Just over a year after she left OpenAI, Thinking Machines Lab was reportedly in early talks to raise capital at a $50 billion valuation.
Key speaking topics
- Frontier AI development and deployment
- Generative AI and large language models
- AI safety, governance and responsible deployment
- AI product leadership at scale
- Public benefit corporation models for frontier technology
- Fine-tuning and model customisation
- AI strategy and adoption for senior leaders
Ideal for
- Boards and senior executive teams setting AI strategy and capital allocation
- CTOs, CIOs and chief AI officers responsible for technology platform decisions
- Public-sector and policy audiences engaging with AI regulation
- Technology investors and corporate development teams evaluating AI exposure
Audience outcomes
- A direct read on how frontier AI labs actually make development and deployment decisions, drawn from someone who made them.
- A grounded view of where current AI capability sits and how far the field is from the frontier claims circulating in headlines.
- A working understanding of governance trade-offs from a builder’s perspective, including how a public benefit corporation structures them.
- A sharper view of which AI investments and adoption decisions deserve board-level attention over the next 18 to 36 months.