Deep Dive: Everyone Wanted a Mind in the Machine (Part 1 — Mira Murati and the dream of thinking machines)
Daily Prompt with Archer & Iris
Saturday, July 18, 2026
The phrase "thinking machine" is forty years old — there was even a company by that name in the 1980s that built a room-sized supercomputer and went bankrupt in 1994. This weekend the name is back, on Mira Murati's lab, which raised two billion dollars before it shipped a thing. Part 1 of a two-part weekend deep dive: the cast, the backstory, and the courtroom that explains how the person who helped end Sam Altman ended up building the next machine. Tomorrow, Part 2 — the live stakes and who gets to govern an AI that talks back.
IN THIS EPISODE
- The dream and the woman: Mira Murati spent six years at OpenAI, two as CTO, and was named interim CEO for the five-day November 2023 crisis she calls "the blip" — a stretch she says the company would have "imploded" without her.
- The blip, in court: Via the 2026 Musk v. Altman trial, Murati's video deposition was played in open court. The board fired Altman for being "not consistently candid in his communications with the board." Murati had funneled screenshots, texts, and notes to cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who turned them into a 52-page memo. On November 16, 2023, four board members signed Altman's termination and named Murati interim CEO.
- The turn: Almost immediately she began helping Altman return — about 78 text messages over 14 hours. Around 2:30am he texted, "can you indicate directionally good or bad? satya and others anxious." She replied, "Directionally very bad. Sam this is very bad," and told him the board didn't want him in the meeting.
- The deposition: Murati testified Altman was "not always" honest with her, undermined her as CTO, and told different executives contradictory things. She said he falsely claimed OpenAI's legal team had cleared a new model from the deployment safety board; she caught the discrepancy and pushed the model through review anyway.
- The lab: She left and founded Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025. By July 2025 it was worth $12B on a ~$2B seed round — led by Andreessen Horowitz (with Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, Jane Street) — before shipping any product. Investors were later reported circling near $50B, roughly 4x the seed in under five months (that round did not close). The founding bench is heavily ex-OpenAI (post-training lead Barret Zoph, VP Lilian Weng, cofounder John Schulman, and others); Meta has since poached a fifth founding member.
- The product thesis: The lab's "interaction models" run full-duplex — listening and speaking at once, more like a phone call than a text thread — with a research system clocking a 0.40-second response. On July 15, 2026 it released its first open model, Inkling: a mixture-of-experts design with 975 billion total parameters but only ~41 billion active per task, trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, image, audio, and video. The bet is against one-size-fits-all: give the model away, sell the tools (Tinker) to adapt it, and have it flag uncertainty instead of guessing.
- The reframe: This was never really a story about a firing. It's about what the person who caught the lie decided to build once she got to start clean — and whether we trust the machine once we can finally talk to it.
NEXT
Tomorrow — Part 2: "Then Someone Had to Teach It How to Talk to Us." The live stakes, and who gets to govern a machine that talks back.
SOURCES
- Mira Murati steps back into the spotlight, carefully (TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/04/mira-murati-steps-back-into-the-spotlight-carefully/
- Mira Murati's deposition pulled back the curtain on Sam Altman's ouster — Musk v. Altman (The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/926383/mira-murati-sam-altman-musk-trial-ouster
- Mira Murati tells the court that she couldn't trust Sam Altman's words (The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/925338/openai-musk-v-altman-mira-murati
- Thinking Machines Lab is worth $12B in seed round (TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/15/mira-muratis-thinking-machines-lab-is-worth-12b-in-seed-round/
- Thinking Machines wants to build an AI that actually listens while it talks (TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/11/thinking-machines-wants-to-build-an-ai-that-actually-listens-while-it-talks/
- Thinking Machines amps up its bet against one-size-fits-all AI with its first open model, Inkling (TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/15/thinking-machines-amps-up-its-bet-against-one-size-fits-all-ai-with-its-first-open-model-inkling/
- Meta snaps up a fifth founding member from Thinking Machines Lab (Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/thinking-machines-lab-loses-another-founding-member-to-meta-2026-4
