Mira Murati is an Albanian-American engineer and executive best known as the longtime chief technology officer of OpenAI, where she oversaw the development of some of the company's most consequential products before departing in 2024 to found her own AI lab.
Murati was born in 1988 in Vlorë, Albania, and later moved to Canada and then the United States for her education, studying mechanical engineering at Dartmouth College. Before joining OpenAI in 2018, she worked at Tesla on the Model X program and at Leap Motion, an AR/VR hardware startup, giving her a background that spanned both hardware and software engineering rather than pure machine learning research.
At OpenAI
As CTO, Murati was responsible for the teams that shipped DALL-E, ChatGPT, and GPT-4, and she became one of OpenAI's most visible public spokespeople, frequently presenting new models and fielding questions about safety and capability. During the November 2023 board crisis, in which the board briefly removed Sam Altman as CEO, Murati was named interim CEO for a few days before Altman's reinstatement, a period widely covered as a test of OpenAI's governance structure.
Departure and Thinking Machines Lab
In September 2024, Murati announced she was leaving OpenAI, citing a desire to create more time and space for her own exploration, without publicly detailing a specific grievance. Her departure came amid a wave of senior researcher exits from OpenAI that year. In February 2025 she launched Thinking Machines Lab, a research company focused on building AI systems that are more customizable and better understood by the people using them, and quickly raised a large seed round that valued the young company in the billions of dollars, reflecting continued investor appetite for teams with senior foundation model experience even at the earliest stage.
Public profile
Murati is frequently cited in coverage of women in AI leadership and of the wave of researchers who left major labs in 2024 and 2025 to start independent ventures, a trend commentators linked to disagreements over pacing, safety culture, and commercial pressure inside the largest AI companies. Her move from a large, product-driven lab to a small independent research company was widely read as a signal that senior researchers increasingly valued autonomy over the scale and resources available only at organizations the size of OpenAI.