Who Is Mira Murati: The AI Startup CEO Who Withstood Meta’s Billion-Dollar Recruitment Offensive

Meta’s ambition to dominate the global artificial intelligence (AI) race has reached dramatic new heights in 2025. Not only did the Menlo Park-based tech giant restructure its entire AI division to create the new Superintelligence Labs, but it also began offering eight-figure salaries in a frenzied attempt to poach talent from rivals. The recruitment offensive has largely paid off, with the company successfully attracting employees from prominent companies such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.

These moves made strategic sense. The targets were senior researchers and engineers in pivotal roles, building products that directly competed for the same slice of the AI market pie Meta was chasing. By poaching this talent, Meta strengthened itself while weakening its rival — one of the oldest tricks in the Silicon Valley playbook.

But then, according to The Wall Street Journal, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unexpectedly set his sights on a startup that neither had a product on the market nor directly competed with the tech giant. However, Zuckerberg was reportedly so fascinated with this startup that he offered to buy it. Despite not having a product, a prototype, or a market-ready technology, the co-founder and CEO of the company reportedly refused the acquisition request.

Frustrated, Zuckerberg turned his attention to the company’s 50 employees, offering them extravagant compensation packages, WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Meta reportedly offered the company’s other co-founder, Andrew Tulloch, a compensation package worth $1 billion (roughly Rs. 8,700 crore) over six years, including bonuses and stock performance.

Tulloch said no. All of the other employees declined the pay cheques as well. If WSJ’s sources are to be believed, this marked the first overwhelming defeat in Meta’s aggressive AI talent war, and at the centre of it all was the CEO of the Thinking Machines Lab, Mira Murati.

Who Is Mira Murati?

Born in 1988 in Albania, Murati moved to Canada for her education and later to the United States, where she earned dual degrees: a Bachelor of Arts from Colby College in 2011 and a Bachelor of Engineering from Dartmouth College in 2012. After working at Tesla as a product manager on the Model X and a brief stint at the augmented reality startup Leap Motion, she joined OpenAI in 2018. She was promoted to Vice President of Applied AI and Partnerships in 2020.

In May 2022, Murati was elevated to the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO). In that capacity, she oversaw development of OpenAI’s most influential products, including ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex, and Sora. She also emerged as a leading voice on AI safety and aligning large language models with human values.

Murati’s name made headlines in November 2023, when she briefly served as interim CEO of OpenAI following Sam Altman’s removal by the board. However, this lasted merely three days, as she was replaced by Emmett Shear, who was himself removed when Altman was reinstated five days later. Murati was once again made the CTO of the company. She stepped down in September 2024 and went on to found Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025.

As mentioned earlier, the startup, which is structured as a public benefit corporation, has not yet announced a product. However, the company’s website describes its mission as developing human-AI collaboration, with an emphasis on building multimodal, flexible, adaptable, and personalised systems that work alongside people.

Despite operating in stealth, Thinking Machine Lab raised $2 billion (roughly Rs. 17,400 crore) in its initial funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, AMD, and Cisco.

In stepping away from OpenAI and rejecting one of the most aggressive hiring plays the AI industry has seen, Murati has turned complete focus to Thinking Machines Lab, a company that continues to operate in stealth, yet attracts capital and talent at scale. What exactly she is building remains unclear, but in Silicon Valley, that kind of silence often speaks volumes.