After nearly 18 months out of major media circulation, Mira Murati—formerly OpenAI’s CTO and now CEO of Thinking Machines Lab—sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday to preview Thinking Machines’ “interaction models.” She also revisited “the blip,
Mira Murati doesn’t carry herself like someone who’s lived for stage lights. As OpenAI’s CTO, she was there for years—but rarely the public face. Now, as CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, she’s been even harder to find.
So when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday—her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months—it landed as a deliberate, careful return. She chose her moments. She didn’t give away much beyond what she wanted people to focus on.
Thinking Machines has spent the last year and a half largely operating in the background, raising capital, hiring researchers, and shipping one product: Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-source AI models.
But the market around her has only gotten louder. OpenAI, where Murati spent six years as CTO, is constantly in the news cycle. Anthropic’s momentum has dominated headlines about next-generation AI capability. And xAI—Elon Musk’s AI venture—has been folded into SpaceX. ahead of what is expected to be its massive public offering. In that atmosphere, staying invisible can cost you more than it saves.
Murati used the Bloomberg appearance to remind people she’s building something new.
She previewed what Thinking Machines calls “interaction models,” describing them as a fundamentally different kind of AI interface. Instead of the familiar turn-based. prompt-and-response dynamic that defines most AI products today. her models are designed to process continuous streams of audio. text. and video in 200-millisecond intervals. The goal. as she framed it. is to capture the texture of human communication—interruptions. mid-thought corrections. and even pauses to think—closer to real time.
Still, she kept the promise small on purpose. She framed the approach as a first step, not a finished product, and declined to put a specific release date on anything.
The interview also pulled her back into the moment that first made her a household name: the chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO. Inside OpenAI, it was later referred to as “the blip.”
Murati said that inside the company, she felt clear about the decisions she made in each moment. She described the “through-line” as protecting the mission and the team—something she said made the choices feel obvious even as the situation appeared to be unraveling from the outside.
She told the interviewer that the company would have “imploded” if not for her involvement during that strange five-day stretch and its immediate aftermath. But she also acknowledged a hard truth that sits underneath many leadership stories: clarity of intent doesn’t automatically translate into clarity about consequences.
In retrospect, she said she would have pushed harder for more information, a better transition plan, and more transparency. What she did not say—at least not directly—was whether she believes things turned out well.
When Bloomberg asked whether she still trusts her former boss, Murati didn’t go there. Instead, she pivoted to a larger concern she returned to more than once: the concentration of consequential decisions in too few hands—not only at OpenAI, but across the industry.
Her worry, she said, wasn’t just about individual character, even though she acknowledged that matters. Her focus was on structural checks. “Good people make bad calls,” she suggested, and well-intentioned organizations can drift. She argued that too much attention has been paid to virtue and too little to governance.
Chang also pressed her on departures of several high-profile researchers from Thinking Machines in recent months—an issue Murati has largely avoided in public. which she downplayed on Thursday. She said that building a frontier AI lab from scratch compresses years of normal organizational volatility into months. She acknowledged that compensation—described as nine-figure packages that have become standard currency in the war for AI talent—captures people’s imaginations. but she suggested it isn’t usually the whole story.
To audience laughter, she delivered a line that sounded almost like a rebuke to the usual industry framing of competition. “When I wake up in the morning, I am not thinking about how to kill the competitor.”
From there. the conversation widened to the future of AI and the people who’ve been caught in the crossfire of the technology’s promises and fears. Chang asked about what comes next. including for humans who AI companies once said would be empowered by AI but who have more recently grown scared—about mass job displacement. and about a future where AI is used to create chemical weapons.
Murati was measured in her response. She pushed back against the framing of inevitable dystopia or inevitable utopia. saying neither outcome is predetermined and that the period the world is in right now will determine which direction things go. And even as she avoided dramatic certainty. she repeated a warning she’d offered during the interview: if humans take their hands off the wheel too soon. the future will look very different—and not better.
For Murati, the return to the spotlight wasn’t about relitigating old headlines. It was about staking a claim to the next chapter—one defined by a new interface for how AI listens and responds, and by a leadership warning drawn from her own experience at OpenAI during “the blip.”
Mira Murati OpenAI Thinking Machines Lab Tinker interaction models fine-tuning API AI interface 200-millisecond intervals Sam Altman the blip Bloomberg governance AI talent xAI SpaceX Anthropic