Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI, made her first major media appearance in 18 months at Bloomberg Tech 2026 in San Francisco on June 4. She used the stage to unveil the roadmap for Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup she co-founded and now leads as CEO.
The company has secured a record-breaking $2 billion seed round and is reportedly in discussions that could push its valuation to $50 billion. That would represent a 5x jump from its initial $10 billion valuation in roughly 16 months.
Key partners include Nvidia, which announced a multiyear chip supply agreement in March 2026 for its upcoming Vera Rubin accelerators, and Google Cloud.
Murati's pitch centers on "interaction models"-AI systems designed for continuous, real-time dialogue with humans. The target latency is 200 milliseconds, roughly the speed of a human blink. The startup's first product is Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-source AI models, positioning Thinking Machines differently from OpenAI's increasingly closed ecosystem.
Murati emphasized maintaining human oversight in AI development, a stance informed by her experience at OpenAI's internal debates about safety and commercialization.
Although several founding-team members have returned to OpenAI or joined Meta, Murati focused on the company's technical direction and the conviction that real-time human-AI collaboration is paramount.
The Nvidia partnership is a significant signal, suggesting the chip giant sees Thinking Machines as a long-term player. The outcome of the funding discussions will be a key indicator of whether there's room for a major independent AI lab outside the current oligopoly.