Thinking Machines Lab, an AI company founded by elite researchers who departed from OpenAI, has secured an unprecedented $2 billion seed funding round, valuing the new venture at $12 billion.
The funding was spearheaded by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing from Nvidia, Accel, Cisco, and AMD, among others. This significant investment underscores the intense competition in developing sophisticated AI systems and highlights the value placed on top talent in the field. It marks the largest seed funding round ever.
Mira Murati, former Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, heads Thinking Machines. Her co-founders include John Schulman, a computer scientist instrumental in creating ChatGPT; Barrett Zoph, former VP of research at OpenAI; Lilian Weng, who focused on AI safety and robotics; Andrew Tulloch, who specialized in pretraining and reasoning; and Luke Metz, who worked on post-training. This confirmation of the team marks the first public acknowledgment by the company.
In a recent post on X, Murati mentioned that Thinking Machines is working on multimodal AI that will engage with humans “through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate.” The company anticipates launching its first product in the coming months, which will feature a significant open-source component designed for researchers and startups creating custom models. Additionally, it plans to share research aimed at aiding the broader AI community in understanding pioneering AI systems.
In just over ten years, AI has evolved from an obscure research field to a hotbed of investment, recruitment, and intense deal-making.
Recent months have seen heightened discussions about AI firms potentially reaching human or superhuman-level capabilities. Thinking Machines Lab has maintained a relatively low profile regarding these advancements.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also disrupted the industry by attracting leading researchers to a new superintelligence lab with lucrative compensation packages. Several former OpenAI researchers have joined his initiative. Given the prominence and expertise of Thinking Machines’ co-founders, it’s likely they were approached as well, although the company has chosen not to comment on this.