Thinking Machines

Extracted Attributes

• CEO

  Mira Murati

• Founded

  2025-02-01

• Founder

  Mira Murati

• Valuation

  $12 billion (USD)

• Headquarters

  San Francisco, California, United States

• Total Funding

  $2 billion (USD)

• Employee Count

  100 (as of 2026)

• Key Technology

  Full duplex interaction (TML-Interaction-Small)

• Chief Scientist

  John Schulman

• Legal Structure

  Public Benefit Corporation

• Primary Product

  Multi-sensory AI models

• Strategic Partnership

  Gigawatt-scale partnership with NVIDIA

Timeline

• Thinking Machines Lab Inc. is founded in San Francisco by Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI, to build customizable AI systems. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2025-02-01

• The company completes a $2 billion early-stage funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the startup at $12 billion. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2025-07-01

• Researchers Barret Zoph and Luke Metz depart Thinking Machines to return to their former employer, OpenAI. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2026-01-01

• Thinking Machines announces TML-Interaction-Small, a full-duplex AI model capable of human-like conversation speeds of 0.40 seconds. (Source: TechCrunch)

  2026-05-11

Thinking Machines Lab

Thinking Machines Lab Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI. The company was founded in February 2025, and by July had completed an early-stage funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, raising $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion overall from investors such as Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, and Jane Street. The company is based in San Francisco and structured as a public benefit corporation.

Web Search Results

• Thinking Machines Corporation - Wikipedia

  Thinking Machines Corporation (TMC) was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product named the Connection Machine. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to the MIT AI Lab. Thinking Machines made some of the most powerful supercomputers of the time, and by 1993 the four fastest computers in the world were Connection Machines. The firm filed for bankruptcy in 1994; its hardware and parallel computing software divisions were acquired in time by Sun Microsystems. [...] In May 1985, Thinking Machines became the third company to register a .com domain name (think.com). The company became profitable in 1989, in part because of its contracts from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The next year, it sold $65 million (USD) worth of hardware and software, making it the market leader in parallel supercomputers. Thinking Machines' primary supercomputer competitor was Cray Research. Other parallel computing competitors included nCUBE, nearby Kendall Square Research, and MasPar, which made a computer similar to the CM-2, and Meiko Scientific, whose CS-2 was similar to the CM-5. In 1991, DARPA and the United States Department of Energy reduced their purchases amid criticism they were unfairly favoring Thinking Machines at the expense of Cray, [...] In August 1994, Thinking Machines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The hardware portion of the company was purchased by Sun Microsystems, and TMC re-emerged as a small software company specializing in parallel software tools for commodity clusters and data mining software for its installed base and former competitors' parallel supercomputers. In December 1996, the parallel software development section was also acquired by Sun Microsystems. Thinking Machines continued as a pure data mining company until it was acquired in 1999 by Oracle Corporation. Oracle later acquired Sun Microsystems, thus re-uniting much of Thinking Machines' intellectual property.

• Thinking Machines | MIT Technology Review

  By Jason Pontinarchive page November 1, 2006 In 1982, when he was still a student at MIT, Danny Hillis cofounded Thinking Machines, one of the most famous failures in the history of computing. A hive of wayward and brilliant researchers, Thinking Machines tried to build the world’s first artificial intelligence. But if the company did not succeed in “building a machine that will be proud of us” (its corporate motto), its Connection Machine demonstrated the practicality of parallel processing, the foundation of modern supercomputing. Today, Danny Hillis is cochair of Applied Minds, a design and invention company, and he is building the Clock of the Long Now, a mechanical timepiece meant to last 10,000 years. [...] Skip to Content MIT Technology Review Featured Topics Newsletters Events Audio MIT Technology Review Featured Topics Newsletters Events Audio # Thinking Machines Danny Hillis talks about the real-world challenges of creating artificially intelligent machines. By Jason Pontinarchive page November 1, 2006 [...] Danny Hillis at the office in an H-1 engine of a Saturn 1B rocket, the first engine stage for the Apollo 7. (Credit: Daniel Hennessey) TR: Why is creating an artificial intelligence so difficult? Hillis: We look to our own minds and watch our patterns of conscious thought, reasoning, planning, and making analogies, and we think, “That’s thinking.” Actually, it’s just the tip of a very deep iceberg. When early AI researchers began, they assumed that hard problems were things like playing chess and passing calculus exams. That stuff turned out to be easy. But the types of thinking that seemed effortless, like recognizing a face or noticing what is important in a story, turned out to be very, very hard. TR: Why did Thinking Machines fail to create a thinking machine?

• Thinking Machines Lab - Wikipedia

  Thinking Machines Lab Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI. The company was founded in February 2025, and by July had completed an early-stage funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, raising $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion overall from investors such as Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, and Jane Street. The company is based in San Francisco and structured as a public benefit corporation. ## History [...] ## History By its launch in February 2025, Thinking Machines Lab was reported to have hired about 30 researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Meta AI, and Mistral AI. Its founding team members include Barret Zoph, former OpenAI VP of Research (Post-Training), Lilian Weng, former OpenAI VP, and OpenAI cofounder John Schulman, who joined after a brief stint at the lab's competitor Anthropic. In January 2026, it was reported that Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, departed the startup to return to OpenAI. [...] Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia ## Contents # Thinking Machines Lab Thinking Machines Lab Inc. | | | --- | | Company type | Private | | Industry | Artificial intelligence | | Founded | February 2025; 1 year ago (2025-02) in San Francisco, California | | Founder | Mira Murati | | Headquarters | San Francisco, California , United States | | Key people | Mira Murati (CEO) John Schulman (chief scientist) | | Products | AI systems and platforms | | Number of employees | 100 (2026) | | Website | thinkingmachines.ai |

• Thinking Machines Lab

  THINKING MACHINES Thinking Machines NEW Long-Term Gigawatt-Scale Strategic Partnership with NVIDIA Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence research and product company. We’re building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals. [...] While AI capabilities have advanced dramatically, key gaps remain. The scientific community’s understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities. Knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and people’s abilities to use AI effectively. And, despite their potential, these systems remain difficult for people to customize to their specific needs and values. To bridge the gaps, we’re building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable. [...] Measure what truly matters. We’ll focus on understanding how our systems create genuine value in the real world. The most important breakthroughs often come from rethinking our objectives, not just optimizing existing metrics. ## Join us We’re building AI systems that push technical boundaries while delivering real value to as many people as possible. Our team combines rigorous engineering with creative exploration, and we’re looking for collaborators to help shape this vision. Follow us on X at @thinkymachines for updates or see our open roles. See open roles

• Thinking Machines wants to build an AI that actually listens while it ...

  Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded last year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, on Monday announced something called interaction models, which, at its essence, sounds like AI that can interrupt you. Right now, every AI model you’ve ever used works the same way. You talk, it listens. It responds, you listen. Thinking Machines is trying to change that by building a model that processes your input and generates a response at the same time, so it’s more like a phone call than a text chain. The technical term for this is “full duplex,” and the company claims its model, TML-Interaction-Small, responds in 0.40 seconds, which is roughly the speed of natural human conversation and significantly faster than comparable models from OpenAI and Google.