Glossary › Players and products
Thinking Machines Lab (TML)
An American artificial intelligence research company founded in 2025 by Mira Murati, former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, to build customizable, human-collaborative AI systems.
In plain terms
Thinking Machines Lab is a San Francisco-based AI startup. It was founded by researchers and engineers who previously worked on ChatGPT and other well-known AI systems. Its most prominent figure is Mira Murati, who was the Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI.
Imagine it like when a chief engineer at a major car manufacturer leaves and opens their own workshop. They have barely produced anything, but investors are already lining up because they know who is working there. The company thus raised record-breaking startup capital before having any product.
The company promises not to give you AI as a closed 'black box'. It wants to provide tools with which researchers and companies can adapt the models to their own needs. It publishes part of its research publicly.
How it works
- The company raises capital from investors and uses it to buy or rent massive computing capacity because training advanced AI models is extremely expensive.
- Its research team works on its own models and methods, particularly on systems that handle text, images, and audio and interact with humans in a natural way.
- Its first product is Tinker, which allows developers and researchers to fine-tune open models on their own data without having to operate the underlying hardware themselves.
- It publishes articles and code based on its results, so others can build on them. Its operation is currently funded mainly by investors' money; revenue from its services is still negligible compared to this.
An everyday example
In the summer of 2025, news spread that an AI company only a few months old received about 2 billion dollars from investors, even though it had no product yet. This was Thinking Machines Lab. You can encounter it directly if a university research group or a company uses the Tinker tool to tune a language model to its own field.
Who is affected
A common misconception
Limits and risks
- Young company: its huge valuation relies more on the team's reputation and expectations than on proven revenue.
- Due to the competition for AI researchers, several founders and lead researchers have already left it for larger companies, which makes its direction uncertain.
- Its product is currently aimed mainly at developers and researchers; as an everyday user, you cannot try it out like a chatbot.
- In a rapidly changing market, news about it becomes outdated quickly, so always check the date of the information.
Similar, but not the same
- OpenAI – OpenAI is the developer of ChatGPT, where most of the founders came from; Thinking Machines Lab is a competitor independent of it, much smaller and younger.
- Thinking Machines Corporation – This was an American supercomputer manufacturer founded in 1983 and since defunct; the current company has no connection to it beyond the similar name.
- Tinker – Tinker is the company's product, a model-tuning service, while Thinking Machines Lab is the company itself.
Related concepts
AI-labor, AI-startup, Artificial intelligence
Tinker
OpenAI, Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence, Fine-tuning, Open-source model
A brief history
Mira Murati left OpenAI in September 2024 and announced her new company in February 2025. In the summer of 2025 it raised about $2 billion in initial funding at a valuation of roughly $12 billion; this was the largest seed round in the venture capital market to date. In October 2025 it launched its first product, Tinker. In autumn 2025 and early 2026, several co-founders left, some for Meta and some returning to OpenAI.
Where things stand
The company is still in early stages in 2026: it has products for developers and agreements for large-scale computing capacity, but has not yet proven itself with a breakthrough model for a broad audience. Meanwhile, it has lost several founders and leading researchers.
Also known as
Thinking Machines Lab · Thinking Machines · TML · Thinking Machines Lab, Inc. · Mira Murati's company · Mira Murati startupja · thinkingmachines.ai
Sources
This entry was machine-edited and has undergone machine expert review; the “In the news” section updates automatically from Agent Age stories.