Mira Murati was born in Vlore, Albania, in 1988. Both parents taught high school literature. At 16 she won a scholarship to Pearson College on Vancouver Island, then studied mathematics at Colby College and mechanical engineering at Dartmouth.
She rose to chief technology officer at OpenAI. In November 2023 she served as interim CEO for about three days after Sam Altman's removal, then returned to her CTO role. She left in September 2024.
She founded Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025 with about 30 researchers from OpenAI, Meta AI and Mistral. In July 2025 it raised about $2 billion at $12 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Albania's government put in $10 million.
The company released its fine-tuning API, Tinker, on 1 October 2025. In January 2026 co-founders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz returned to OpenAI. It released the Inkling model on 15 July 2026 and Inkling Small on 31 July 2026.