Mira Murati: OpenAI CTO, 3-Day CEO & Thinking Machines Lab
Former OpenAI CTO who served as interim CEO for three days in 2023, now runs Thinking Machines Lab, valued at $12B before shipping its first product.
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Mira Murati is the former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI who served as interim CEO for three days in November 2023. Today she runs Thinking Machines Lab, a startup valued at $12 billion before shipping its first product. Born in Vlora, Albania, she’s a mechanical engineer from Dartmouth and former Tesla product manager. Facts checked September 18, 2026.
| Who | Co-founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab (from February 2025), previously CTO of OpenAI (May 2022 - September 2024) |
| Born | December 16, 1988, Vlora, Albania (37 years old) |
| Education | Pearson College UWC in Canada (scholarship), BA from Colby College (2011), mechanical engineering at Dartmouth (2012), honorary doctorate from Dartmouth (2024) |
| Career | Goldman Sachs (intern), Zodiac Aerospace, Tesla (Model X, 2013-2016), Leap Motion (2016-2018), OpenAI (2018-2024) |
| At OpenAI | Led ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex and Sora; interim CEO November 17-20, 2023 |
| Company today | Thinking Machines Lab: $2B seed round at $12B valuation (Andreessen Horowitz, Albanian government), product Tinker launched October 2025 |
From Vlora Through Canada to Tesla
Murati was born in Vlora on the Adriatic coast and speaks fluent English and Italian. At 16, she left on scholarship to Pearson College UWC on Vancouver Island, completed a dual degree at Colby College and Dartmouth, where she studied mechanical engineering. After an internship at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo and a brief stint at Zodiac Aerospace, she joined Tesla in 2013 as a product manager on the Model X. From 2016 to 2018, she led product and engineering at Leap Motion, a gesture-control startup.
OpenAI: From ChatGPT to Three Days as CEO
She joined OpenAI in 2018 as VP of Applied AI and Partnerships, and became CTO in May 2022. She oversaw research, product and safety teams, including work on ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex and Sora. When the board fired Sam Altman on November 17, 2023, Murati became interim CEO; after three days Emmett Shear replaced her, and after five days Altman returned. It later emerged that the 52-page memo by Ilya Sutskever on which the board based its decision relied heavily on screenshots and information from Murati. She returned to the CTO role, and in September 2024 left to “do my own exploration”; that same week OpenAI also lost chief research officer Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph.
Thinking Machines Lab: $12B Before First Product
In February 2025 she announced Thinking Machines Lab, a public benefit corporation aiming to make AI systems “more understandable, configurable and generally capable.” She recruited around 30 researchers from OpenAI, Meta and Mistral, including OpenAI co-founder John Schulman. In April 2025 the company raised $2 billion in seed funding at a $12 billion valuation, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and the Albanian government, which contributed $10 million. Murati holds the deciding vote on the board. The first product, Tinker, a tool for fine-tuning custom models, launched in October 2025. You can track how it compares to other labs in our AI model rankings.
Google · Your sourcesQuantslant higher in your Google - one clickAdd to preferred sources →Most Common Questions
How old is Mira Murati?
37. She was born December 16, 1988 in Vlora, Albania.
Why did she leave OpenAI?
Officially, to pursue her own project. The departure came a year after the November 2023 crisis in which she played a role both as interim CEO and as a source of information for the board, and coincided with the departure of other research leaders.
What does Thinking Machines Lab do?
It builds tools for creating and fine-tuning models (Tinker) and conducts research on AI system predictability. It doesn’t have a public chat interface like ChatGPT.
Sources checked September 18, 2026: Wikipedia EN “Mira Murati” with citations (TechCrunch, Bloomberg, Fortune, The Verge from May 11, 2026, RTSH), Thinking Machines Lab website.
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