Thinking Machines Lab

Thinking Machines Lab is an AI research and product company founded in February 2025 by Mira Murati (former OpenAI CTO), John Schulman (Chief Scientist, OpenAI co-founder), and Barrett Zoph (CTO, former OpenAI VP Research). Its mission is "collaborative general intelligence" — AI that understands and responds through text, audio, and vision simultaneously, rather than as modular add-ons. Its first live product is Tinker, a fine-tuning API that lets developers and researchers customize open-weights frontier models using their own data and training algorithms, while Thinking Machines manages the compute. In May 2026, the company previewed "interaction models" — a single-network architecture trained from the ground up to listen, speak, and see concurrently, achieving sub-500ms conversational turn-taking. Structured as a public benefit corporation, it publishes research openly and targets AI developers, enterprises, and the research community. Customers range from individual researchers to organizations wanting customized, on-brand frontier AI without building their own training infrastructure.

$12B post-money (seed, July 2025); $50–60B fundraise attempted Nov 2025, collapsed Jan 2026 valuation · 200 employees · 36 open roles

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Thinking Machines Lab

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