Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new AI enterprise, Pondering Machines Lab, has gained two new distinguished advisors: Bob McGrew, beforehand OpenAI’s chief analysis officer, and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher behind lots of the firm’s extra transformative improvements.
Pondering Machines Lab’s website was quietly up to date with McGrew and Radford’s names someday in March. A spokesperson for the startup didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
McGrew joined OpenAI as a member of the technical workers in 2017 and was promoted to VP of analysis in 2018 earlier than assuming the position of chief analysis officer. He left in September 2024, saying on the time that he meant to take a “break.”
Radford, who departed OpenAI late final 12 months to pursue unbiased analysis after near a decade on the firm, was the lead writer of OpenAI’s seminal analysis paper on generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs). GPTs underpin OpenAI’s hottest merchandise, together with the corporate’s AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT. Radford additionally labored on a number of fashions within the firm’s GPT collection in addition to the speech recognition mannequin Whisper and DALL-E, OpenAI’s image-generating mannequin.
Pondering Machines Lab has up to now been obscure about its analysis agenda and product roadmap. However in an announcement in February, the startup stated that it intends to construct tooling to “make AI work for [people’s] distinctive wants and targets” and to create AI methods which are “extra extensively understood, customizable, and usually succesful” than these at the moment accessible.
Murati is heading up Pondering Machines Lab as CEO. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the corporate’s chief scientist, and Barret Zoph, who led mannequin post-training at OpenAI, is the CTO.
Murati left OpenAI last October after six years at the company. She got here to OpenAI as VP of utilized AI and partnerships. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, Murati led the corporate’s work on ChatGPT, DALL-E, and the code-generating system Codex, which powered early variations of GitHub’s Copilot programming assistant.
At one level, Murati was stated to be in talks to boost over $100 million from unnamed VC companies for Pondering Machines Lab, which counts dozens of staff from high AI labs together with OpenAI and Google DeepMind amongst its ranks.