AI lab, San Francisco
Thinking Machines Lab
San Francisco · Founded February 2025
Quick read
Thinking Machines Lab is an AI research and product company founded in February 2025 and headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, it raised a record $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation within its first five months. It's best known for Tinker, a fine-tuning API for developers, and a May 2026 research preview of Interaction Models, a native multimodal architecture capable of 0.4-second response times.
Key facts
- Founded
- February 2025
- Founders
- Mira Murati, Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, Andrew Tulloch
- Employees
- 169
- Sectors
- ai
- Website
- thinkingmachines.ai/
Mission
Build AI systems that are more understandable, customizable, and capable of real-time multimodal collaboration with humans, operating as a public benefit corporation.
Recent activity
- Jul 2026productThinking Machines Lab released Inkling, a large language model, on July 15, 2026 under the Apache License. A smaller variant, Inkling Small (276 billion parameters), followed on July 31, 2026 with comparable performance to the full model. en.wikipedia.org
- Jul 2026leadershipLilian Weng, a co-founder and former OpenAI VP, announced her departure from Thinking Machines Lab, per reporting on July 28, 2026. tracxn.com
- May 2026productThinking Machines Lab announced 'interaction models' on May 11, 2026 — full-duplex AI systems that process audio, video, and text as one continuous stream rather than in turns, allowing the model to respond while the user is still speaking. techcrunch.com
- Apr 2026leadershipMeta hired its fifth founding member from Thinking Machines Lab — engineer Joshua Gross, who built the Tinker API — bringing total founding-team departures to five. Co-founder Andrew Tulloch had left in October 2025 with a reported $1.5 billion compensation package over six years. thenextweb.com
- Apr 2026leadershipThinking Machines Lab hired Soumith Chintala, creator of PyTorch, as its new CTO, replacing Barret Zoph who had departed in January 2026. techstory.in
- Mar 2026investmentThinking Machines Lab and NVIDIA announced a long-term gigawatt-scale strategic partnership on March 10, 2026, including an undisclosed investment and a multi-year agreement to deploy one gigawatt of Vera Rubin computing capacity. thinkingmachines.ai
- Jan 2026leadershipCo-founders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, along with founding researcher Sam Schoenholz, left Thinking Machines Lab and rejoined OpenAI on January 15, 2026. Murati told staff that Zoph's employment had been terminated for unethical conduct; OpenAI disputed that characterization. A planned fundraise near a $50 billion valuation fell apart around the same time. bloomberg.com
- Oct 2025productThinking Machines Lab launched Tinker on October 1, 2025 — an API that lets researchers and small teams fine-tune open-weight language models using LoRA without managing their own GPU clusters. It entered private beta and was free at launch. eweek.com
- Jun 2026productMira Murati broke roughly 18 months of public silence to reveal the company's roadmap, including a new product category called Interaction Models — built on full-duplex communication rather than the turn-based prompt-and-response pattern used by most AI chatbots today. solidaitech.com
- Mar 2026fundraiseThinking Machines Lab announced a long-term strategic partnership with NVIDIA, including an undisclosed investment and a multi-year agreement to deploy one gigawatt of Vera Rubin computing capacity. Tracxn records this as the company's third funding round. thinkingmachines.ai
- Jan 2026leadershipCo-founders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz departed the company and returned to OpenAI, along with Sam Schoenholz. Reports state Zoph was dismissed by Murati for what the company described as 'unethical conduct' before he rejoined OpenAI. A planned follow-on funding round at a $60 billion valuation collapsed after prospective backers declined to support that price, and the company's valuation reverted to $12 billion. thenextweb.com
- Jul 2025fundraiseThinking Machines Lab raised a $2 billion seed round — reported as the largest in history — at a $12 billion valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included NVIDIA, Accel, Cisco, and AMD. The raise also formally announced the company's cofounders. wired.com
Key people
Named individuals at the firm. We don't expose direct email or phone — use their LinkedIn for outreach.
- Mira Murati · Co-Founder & CEO
- Anna Goldie · CTO
- John Schulman · Co-Founder & Chief Scientist
- Barret Zoph · Co-founder & CTO
- Lilian Weng · Co-founder
- Andrew Tulloch · Co-founder
Sources
- Inside Thinking Machines Lab, Mira Murati's New AI Startup | Built In
- Thinking Machines Lab Raises a Record $2 Billion | WIRED
- Thinking Machines Lab commits to a gigawatt of Nvidia compute | Axios
- Thinking Machines Lab Unveils Full-Duplex AI | The AI Insider
- The Drama at Thinking Machines, a New A.I. Start-Up | NYT
- Thinking Machines Lab Sees Key Talent Leave for Meta, OpenAI, XAI | Business Insider
- Meta has snapped up a fifth founding member from Thinking Machines Lab | Business Insider
- Thinking Machines Lab - Wikipedia
- https://coinpulsehq.com/thinking-machines-lab-meta-talent/
- https://themoneytimes.media/2026/02/05/a-legendary-coder-has-been-quietly-working-at-mira-murati-s-thinking-machines-lab/
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/mira-muratis-startup-thinking-machines-lab-is-losing-two-of-its-co-founders-to-openai/
- https://startuptalky.com/news/thinking-machines-lab-appoints-pytorch-co-creator-soumith-chintala-as-cto/
- https://www.kineticstaff.com/from-openai-to-thinking-machines-mira-muratis-bold-leap-and-the-opportunities-opening-for-new-tech-founders/
- https://www.solidaitech.com/2026/06/thinking-machines-lab.html
- https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/
- https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-thinking-machines-lab-talent-raid
- https://research.contrary.com/company/thinking-machines-lab
- https://tracxn.com/d/companies/thinking-machines-lab/__uSPGa2dnvHKfeiBjkNrQCkPFX-QcGogbaGhPqmvYk8k
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/11/thinking-machines-wants-to-build-an-ai-that-actually-listens-while-it-talks/
- https://techstory.in/metas-strategic-decimation-of-thinking-machines-lab/
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-15/openai-hires-three-staffers-from-mira-murati-s-ai-startup
- https://www.eweek.com/news/thinking-machines-lab-tinker/
Other companies in United States
Frequently asked
What is Thinking Machines Lab?+
Thinking Machines Lab is an AI research and product company founded in February 2025 and headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, it raised a record $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation within its first five months.
Where is Thinking Machines Lab headquartered?+
Thinking Machines Lab is headquartered in San Francisco, United States.
When was Thinking Machines Lab founded?+
Thinking Machines Lab was founded in February 2025 by Mira Murati, Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, Andrew Tulloch.
What sectors does Thinking Machines Lab operate in?+
Thinking Machines Lab focuses on ai. They primarily operate in these sectors.
Who is the CEO of Thinking Machines Lab?+
Mira Murati is the CEO of Thinking Machines Lab.
How do I prepare for a meeting with Thinking Machines Lab?+
Brief generates a structured pre-meeting briefing on any person at Thinking Machines Lab — quick read, recent activity, points of view, and conversation openers tailored to what you sell. Sign in to get personalised openers for your product.
Meeting with someone at Thinking Machines Lab?
Brief generates a structured pre-meeting briefing on any person in seconds.
Try Brief →Generated by briefthecall.com from public web sources. Last updated August 13, 2026. Each claim is linked to its source above.
Automatically generated by AI from public sources. May be inaccurate or out of date. Remove or correct this profile →