Mira Murati, then chief technology officer of OpenAI, speaks at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California, on October 17, 2023.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Nvidia has made a “significant investment” in Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab as part of a new multi-year strategic partnership, the companies announced on Tuesday.
Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence startup Murati founded last year that aims to create AI systems that are “more widely understood, customizable, and universally functional,” according to its website. The company has kept its efforts largely secret, offering few details about its long-term ambitions.
Nvidia is one of the biggest winners of the AI boom because it makes the graphics processing units needed to train models and run large-scale workloads. The company has invested in a number of prominent AI startups in recent years, including clients OpenAI and Anthropic.
Murati is the former chief technology officer of OpenAI and served as the company’s interim CEO when Sam Altman was temporarily fired in 2023. She left OpenAI the following year and has largely stayed away from public life ever since.
As part of its partnership with Nvidia, Thinking Machines Lab has also agreed to deploy at least 1 gigawatt of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems, the chipmaker’s most advanced product, scheduled to ship in the second half of this year.
The companies did not provide additional details regarding the size of NVIDIA’s investment.
“Thinking Machines has assembled a world-class team to advance the frontiers of AI,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “We are excited to partner with Thinking Machines to realize their exciting vision for the future of AI.”
The company released its first product, known as Tinker, in October. It is an application programming interface that allows researchers and developers to fine-tune AI models. Thinking Machines Lab raised $2 billion from investors in July.
Murati was featured on CNBC’s Changemakers List for the third time this year.
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