Researchers at Thinking Machines Lab Secure Historic $2 Billion Funding, Co-Founders Announcement
In a groundbreaking move, Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence (AI) company, has raised a staggering $2 billion in a seed round. This funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz, also includes high-profile investors such as Nvidia, Accel, Cisco, AMD, and others.
The startup, which is valued at $12 billion, is led by CEO Mira Murati, formerly the Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI. Murati played a significant role in developing notable AI products like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and voice models. She is joined by John Schulman, the Chief Scientist, who helped build ChatGPT at OpenAI, and Barret Zoph, the Chief Technology Officer, who previously held the same position at OpenAI.
Thinking Machines Lab is developing multimodal AI that interacts with humans through conversation, sight, and collaboration. The company has not publicly stated anything about reaching human- or superhuman-level AI, but the discussion about AI firms achieving such levels has intensified recently.
The team at Thinking Machines Lab also includes Lilian Weng, an expert in AI safety and robotics, Andrew Tulloch, an expert in pretraining and reasoning, Luke Metz, an expert in post-training, Devendra Chaplot, an AI researcher, and Myle Ott, a researcher with a strong background in AI.
Several OpenAI researchers have also been recruited by Meta's new superintelligence lab, adding to the growing competition in the AI sector. AI has transformed from a research focus to a high-stakes and dramatic investment, recruitment, and dealmaking.
Thinking Machines Lab will release its first product within the next few months, which will include a significant open-source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models. The company will also release research to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems.
While the exact composition of the team beyond these key figures is not confirmed by all sources, it is known that the team includes researchers from other prominent AI companies such as Meta AI, Mistral AI, Character.AI, and Google DeepMind.
As the race to develop advanced AI continues, Thinking Machines Lab's $2 billion seed round and its ambitious plans for multimodal AI interaction mark a significant milestone in the AI industry.
[1] https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/ [2] https://www.wired.com/story/thinking-machines-ai-2-billion-seed-round/ [3] https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/16/23600671/thinking-machines-lab-ai-startup-funding-round-2-billion-seed-mira-murati-john-schulman-barret-zoph-lilian-weng-andrew-tulloch-luke-metz-devendra-chaplot-myle-ott
- In the rapidly evolving AI landscape, the funding of $2 billion by Andreessen Horowitz and other investors into the AI startup Thinking Machines Lab is sparking a flurry of newsletters and discussions in business circles, with a focus on its ambitious plans for multimodal AI interaction and its team, which includes former OpenAI executives and researchers from other prominent AI companies. [Source: 2]
- As part of its mission, Thinking Machines Lab will soon unveil its first product, an AI system with an open-source component, targeting researchers and startups developing custom models, and will also publish research to aid the AI community in understanding frontier AI systems. [Source: 3]
- Meanwhile, Meta's new superintelligence lab continues to recruit OpenAI researchers, contributing to the heightened competition in the AI sector. This funding round and development by Thinking Machines Lab mark a pivotal step in the race to achieve advanced AI, leveraging technology that will impact AI newsletters, business strategies, and technology development for startups. [Sources: 1, 2, 3]
