Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new AI venture, Thinking Machines Lab, has gained two new prominent advisors: Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI’s chief research officer, and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher behind many of the company’s more transformative innovations.
Thinking Machines Lab’s website was quietly updated with McGrew and Radford’s names sometime in March. A spokesperson for the startup didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
McGrew joined OpenAI as a member of the technical staff in 2017 and was promoted to VP of research in 2018 before assuming the role of chief research officer. He left in September 2024, saying at the time that he intended to take a “break.”
Radford, who departed OpenAI late last year to pursue independent research after close to a decade at the company, was the lead author of OpenAI’s seminal research paper on generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs). GPTs underpin OpenAI’s most popular products, including the company’s AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT. Radford also worked on several models in the company’s GPT series as well as the speech recognition model Whisper and DALL-E, OpenAI’s image-generating model.
Thinking Machines Lab has so far been vague about its research agenda and product roadmap. But in an announcement in February, the startup said that it intends to build tooling to “make AI work for [people’s] unique needs and goals” and to create AI systems that are “more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable” than those currently available.
Murati is heading up Thinking Machines Lab as CEO. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the company’s chief scientist, and Barret Zoph, who led model post-training at OpenAI, is the CTO.
Murati left OpenAI last October after six years at the company. She came to OpenAI as VP of applied AI and partnerships. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, Murati led the company’s work on ChatGPT, DALL-E, and the code-generating system Codex, which powered early versions of GitHub’s Copilot programming assistant.
At one point, Murati was said to be in talks to raise over $100 million from unnamed VC firms for Thinking Machines Lab, which counts dozens of employees from top AI labs including OpenAI and Google DeepMind among its ranks.
