Mira Murati is no natural creature of the conference stage. As CTO of OpenAI, he was present but rarely the public face of the company. As CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, she’s been even harder to find. So when he sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday (his first major media appearance in about 18 months), it was worth paying attention to, even if he was careful not to say too much.
The timing makes sense. Thinking Machines has spent the better part of a year and a half operating largely in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers and shipping a product. Gypsyan API for fine-tuning open source AI models.
Meanwhile, companies competing for the same talent, customers and incumbents have only become more ubiquitous. OpenAI, where Murati spent six years as CTO, is constantly in the news cycle. Anthropic’s momentum is all we can talk about right now. And xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, joined SpaceX ahead of what is expected to be its massive public offering, generating its own gravitational pull on attention and investment. In that environment, keeping your head down has diminishing returns; At some point, you have to make some noise just to remind the market that you exist.
Murati used Bloomberg’s appearance to do exactly that and not much else. She anticipated what Thinking Machines calls “interaction models“, which he described as a fundamentally different type of AI interface. Instead of the turn-based, prompt-and-response dynamics that define most AI products today, he told interviewer Emily Chang, the company’s models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text and video in 200-millisecond intervals. The idea is that they can capture the texture of human communication (the interruptions, the mid-thought corrections, even the pauses for thought) in something closer to real time. But Murati was careful to present it as a first step, not a finished product, and declined to put a specific release date.
She also answered questions about the episode that first put her most directly in the public eye: the chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO. Within OpenAI it came to be called “the problem.” Murati said his decisions felt clear at every moment: that protecting the mission and the team was the common thread that made the options seem obvious even when the situation seemed to be falling apart from the outside. He said the company would have “imploded” if not for his involvement during that strange five-day period and its immediate aftermath. But he recognized that clarity of intention is not the same as clarity about consequences. In hindsight, he said, he would have pushed harder for more information, a better transition plan and more transparency. What he didn’t say, at least not directly, is whether he thinks things turned out well.
When asked if he still trusts his former boss, he avoided the question and steered the conversation toward a larger concern that he returned to several times: the concentration of important decisions in too few hands, not just at OpenAI but across the industry. His concern, he said, has less to do with the character of any individual leader (although he acknowledged that matters) and more to do with the absence of structural controls. Good people make bad decisions. Well-intentioned organizations drift. Too much attention has been paid to virtue and too little to governance, he suggested.
Chang also politely pressed her on the departures of several high-profile researchers from Thinking Machines in recent months, a topic Murati has largely avoided in public and which she downplayed on Thursday. First, he said, building a cutting-edge AI lab from scratch compresses years of normal organizational volatility into months. He also acknowledged that compensation — the nine-figure packages that have become standard currency in the war for AI talent — captures people’s imagination, but suggested it’s usually not the whole story. To laughter from the audience, he said of his own competitive instincts: “When I wake up in the morning, I’m not thinking about how to kill the competitor.”
Naturally, Chang asked what’s next for AI in general, including for humans who AI companies once said would be empowered by AI, but who have more recently been spooked by rumors of mass job displacement, not to mention a future in which AI will be used to create chemical weapons.
Murati, who was born in Albania and speaks with a slight Eastern European accent, was measured in her response. She rejected the framework of an inevitable dystopia or an inevitable utopia, arguing that neither outcome is predetermined and that the period we are in now is what will determine the direction things take. Still, he said (and not for the first time during the interview) that if humans take their hands off the wheel too soon, the future will be very different and not better.
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