Mira Murati is not a natural creature of the conference scene. As CTO of OpenAI, he was involved but rarely the public face of the company. As CEO of his own company, Thinking Machines Lab, he has been even harder to find. So when he sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday — his first major media appearance in nearly 18 months — it was worth paying attention to, even if he was careful not to talk too much.
The timing makes sense. Thinking Machines spent the better part of a year and a half working mostly in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers, and shipping a product. TinkerAPI for fine-tuning open source AI models.
At the same time, companies competing for the same talent, clients and titles have expanded. OpenAI, where Murati worked as CTO for six years, is constantly in the news. Anthropic speed is all anyone can talk about right now. Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence field, xAI, joined SpaceX before it was expected to go public, drawing its own traction on attention and investment. In this environment, staying upside down has diminishing returns; at some point you need to make some noise to remind the market that you exist.
Murati used the Bloomberg appearance to do just that, and no more. He looked at what Thinking Machines called “interaction modelsRather than the turn-based, operational, and responsive dynamics that define most AI products today, he told interviewer Emily Chang, the company’s models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text, and video at 200-millisecond intervals. The idea is that they can intercept human communication, intercept text. tweaks, even pauses to think—into something closer to real-time, but Murati was careful to frame it as a first step rather than a finished product, and refused to put a specific release date on anything.
He also answered questions about the episode that first brought him to public attention: the chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and he became interim CEO. In OpenAI they called it “blip”. Murati said he felt clear about his decisions at every moment — protecting the mission and the team was the transition line that made the options feel open, even when the situation looked like it was falling apart from the outside. He said the company would have “exploded” if it hadn’t been for the odd five-day period and its immediate aftermath. But he acknowledged that clarity of intent is not the same as clarity of consequences. In retrospect, he said, he would have pushed harder for more information, a better transition plan and more transparency. What he doesn’t say directly, at least, is whether he thinks things are going well.
When asked if he still trusted his former boss, he dodged the question and steered the conversation toward a larger concern he returned to several times: the concentration of consequential decisions in too few hands — not just at OpenAI, but across the industry. His concern, he said, was less about the character of any individual leader (though he acknowledged its importance) and more about the lack of structural checks. Good people make bad calls. Well-intentioned organizations are creeping. He suggested that there was too much emphasis on virtue and too little emphasis on governance.
Chang has also politely pressured several high-profile researchers to leave Thinking Machines in recent months. First, he said, building a frontier AI lab from scratch compresses years of normal organizational change into months. He also acknowledged that compensation — the nine-figure packages that have become standard currency in the war for AI talent — captures people’s imaginations, but he suggested that’s not the whole story at all. To laughter from some in the audience, he said of his competitive instincts: “When I wake up in the morning, I don’t think about how to kill an opponent.”
Of course, Chang asked what the future holds for AI, not to mention a future in which AI is used to create chemical weapons, including the people who AI companies once said would be empowered by AI, but who recently feared talk of mass job displacement.
Born in Albania and speaking with a slight Eastern European accent, Murati’s response was measured. He pushed back on the inevitable dystopia or inevitable utopia framework, arguing that no outcome is predetermined and that the times we live in will determine which way things go. Still, he said, not for the first time during an interview, that if people take their hands off the wheel too soon, the future will look very different and not better.
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