Mira Murati, Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, speaks during 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 that Murati founded last year, and it aims to make AI systems that are “more widely understood, customizable and generally capable,” according to its website. The company has kept its work largely under wraps and has shared few details about its long-term ambitions.
Nvidia has been one of the biggest winners of the AI boom because it makes the graphics processing units that are necessary to train models and run large workloads. It’s invested in a number of prominent AI startups in recent years, including OpenAI and Anthropic, which are also customers.
Murati is the former CTO of OpenAI, and she served as the company’s interim CEO when Sam Altman was briefly ousted in 2023. She departed OpenAI the following year and has remained largely out of the public eye since then.
As part of its partnership with Nvidia, Thinking Machines Lab has also agreed to deploy at least one gigawatt of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems, the chipmaker’s most advanced offering that’s expected to ship in the second half of the year.
The companies declined to share additional details about the size of Nvidia’s investment.
“Thinking Machines has brought together a world-class team to advance the frontier of AI,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with Thinking Machines to realize their exciting vision for the future of AI.”
The startup released its first product, known as Tinker, in October, which 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 appeared on the third annual CNBC Changemakers list this year.
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