Thinking Machines Lab, the AI venture led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is reportedly seeking to raise a staggering $2 billion in seed funding, according to Business Insider. This represents a doubling of the company's initial fundraising target of $1 billion reported just two months ago.
Key Points:
- Murati has doubled her initial fundraising target from $1B to $2B
- The startup has attracted several high-profile AI researchers from OpenAI
- If successful, this would likely be the largest seed round in history
The eye-popping round, if closed, would value the pre-product company at "at least" $10 billion and likely stand as the largest seed round in venture capital history.
What makes investors ready to write such enormous checks to a company with no product or revenue? The answer appears to be talent. Thinking Machines has assembled an impressive roster of AI researchers, many poached from OpenAI's ranks.
Recent additions include Bob McGrew, OpenAI's former chief research officer, and Alec Radford, a researcher behind many of OpenAI's transformative innovations. Other notable team members include John Schulman (co-lead on ChatGPT), Barret Zoph (ChatGPT co-creator), and Alexander Kirillov, who worked on ChatGPT's voice mode.
Murati herself spent over six years at OpenAI working on ChatGPT and briefly served as interim CEO during Sam Altman's tumultuous but short-lived ouster in November 2023.
The massive funding round reflects both the intense investor enthusiasm for generative AI and the scarcity of teams with proven experience building successful AI products. It also underscores the enormous costs associated with training cutting-edge AI models and attracting top talent in today's competitive market.
While specifics about Thinking Machines Lab's product roadmap remain scarce, Murati has positioned the startup as focused on making AI "more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable" than current offerings. How exactly the company plans to differentiate itself in a field crowded with well-funded competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google remains to be seen.
The AI funding landscape continues to defy gravity, with Murati's former OpenAI colleague Ilya Sutskever raising $1 billion last year for his own AI startup, Safe Superintelligence. If Thinking Machines Lab succeeds in raising $2 billion, it would set a new high-water mark for AI startup ambition – and investor confidence – in an increasingly crowded field.