She may not have the same name recognition as other tech execs like Tim Cook, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg—not yet, anyway—but Mira Murati is one of the most-watched entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The former chief technology officer from OpenAI, who left to launch her own AI startup last year, just celebrated a major milestone: Her company, Thinking Machines Lab, just launched its first product this week, called Tinker. Rather than be another generative-AI chatbot like ChatGPT, Tinker is designed to help researchers and developers fine-tune AI models without the need to manage massive computing infrastructure. The launch represents the first commercial product from Thinking Machines, which raised a record-breaking $2 billion in seed funding at a $12 billion valuation.
Murati, the 36-year-old Albanian-American engineer-turned-executive, has emerged as a defining figure in the AI boom. Her journey from a mechanical engineering student to the chief technology officer who helped create ChatGPT exemplifies the rapid transformation of both AI technology and the careers of those building it. More recently, her ability to resist Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive recruitment efforts—including reported billion-dollar offers to acquire her company and poach her talent—has solidified her reputation as a leader willing to chart her own course in an industry dominated by tech giants.
From Albania to the world stage
Born on December 16, 1988, in Vlorë, Albania, during the final years of the country’s totalitarian regime, Murati’s early life was shaped by political upheaval and economic uncertainty. Her parents, both high school teachers who taught literature, encouraged her academic pursuits, but Murati told Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott in 2023 that she had an “organic interest towards math and science,” where she excelled in Olympiads and competitions throughout her schooling.
At 16, Murati won a scholarship from United World Colleges—a program that brings together students from over 80 countries to promote intercultural understanding and social responsibility—to study at Pearson College on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. But after graduating from Pearson in 2005, Murati pursued an unusual academic path that would prove prescient for her later career. She enrolled in a dual-degree program, completing a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from Colby College in 2011 and a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering in 2012. This combination of liberal arts and engineering disciplines provided her with both analytical thinking skills and technical expertise, which would prove handy in her later roles in Silicon Valley.
Murati’s professional journey began with a summer analyst internship at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo in 2011, followed by a brief stint as an Advanced Concepts Engineer at Zodiac Aerospace from 2012 to 2013. She joined Tesla that same year as a senior product manager for the Model X program, contributing to the development of Tesla’s SUV project. In 2016, she joined Leap Motion, an augmented-reality startup, as vice president of product and engineering. During her two-year tenure, she focused on advancing human-computer interaction technology, helping shape the company’s product offerings and market strategy. This role positioned her perfectly for the next phase of her career in AI development.
The OpenAI years
Murati joined OpenAI in June 2018, as vice president of applied AI and partnerships, during a pivotal period for the organization. She quickly rose through the ranks, becoming senior vice president of research, product and partnerships in 2020, before being promoted to chief technology officer in 2022.
As CTO, Murati oversaw the development of some of the most transformative AI technologies of the modern era. She led teams working on ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex, and Sora—products that fundamentally changed how the public interacts with artificial intelligence. Her leadership was instrumental in scaling OpenAI from a research organization to one of the most important AI companies in the world.
In November 2023, Murati briefly found herself at the center of Silicon Valley drama when she was named interim CEO following Sam Altman’s sudden removal by OpenAI’s board. Though her tenure lasted only three days before being replaced by Emmett Shear, who then stepped aside when Altman was reinstated, the episode highlighted her standing within the organization and the industry—and, given the media firestorm, it ended up being the first time many people heard the name “Mira Murati.”
However, Murati’s tenure at OpenAI was not without controversy. At a speaking engagement at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, Murati made comments about AI’s impact on creative jobs that sparked significant backlash. “Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” she said. Critics, including from Dartmouth’s own student body, accused her of being tone-deaf to the concerns of artists and writers whose livelihoods are threatened by AI automation.
Despite the controversy, Murati has consistently advocated for responsible AI development and government regulation. In a 2023 interview with Time Magazine, she said: “It’s important for OpenAI and companies like ours to bring this into the public consciousness in a way that’s controlled and responsible. But we’re a small group of people and we need a ton more input in this system and a lot more input that goes beyond the technologies—definitely regulators and governments and everyone else.”
Building Thinking Machines Lab
In September 2024, Murati announced her departure from OpenAI to pursue “my own exploration,” publishing the note she shared with her fellow employees on X.
“There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right. Our recent releases of speech-to-speech and OpenAl o1 mark the beginning of a new era in interaction and intelligence — achievements made possible by your ingenuity and craftsmanship,” she said. “I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to build and work alongside this remarkable team.”
Months later, in February of this year, Murati officially launched Thinking Machines Lab, a public benefit corporation focused on developing AI systems that are more accessible, customizable, and human-aligned. The startup assembled an impressive roster of talent, recruiting approximately 30 researchers and engineers from leading AI firms including former colleagues from OpenAI, as well as experts from Google, Meta, Mistral, and Character AI. The team’s collective expertise and Murati’s track record enabled the company to raise $2 billion in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Nvidia, AMD, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, and Jane Street, giving her startup a $12 billion valuation.
Resisting Silicon Valley giants
The true test of Murati’s leadership came when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched what The Wall Street Journal called a “full-scale raid” on her startup. Zuckerberg reportedly approached more than a dozen employees at the 50-person company, offering packages ranging from $200 million to $1.5 billion over multiple years. One researcher reportedly received an offer worth over $1 billion, while others were promised earnings between $50 million and $100 million in their first year alone.
The aggressive recruitment campaign targeted key figures including Andrew Tulloch, Murati’s co-founder and a machine-learning expert who previously worked at Meta for over a decade. Despite the astronomical offers, not a single employee accepted Meta’s proposals—a remarkable display of loyalty in an industry where talent frequently moves for financial incentives.
This resistance speaks to both Murati’s leadership and the team’s belief in Thinking Machines Lab’s mission. As she said when announcing the company’s funding: “We believe AI should serve as an extension of individual agency and, in the spirit of freedom, be distributed as widely and equitably as possible.”
Murati’s present and AI’s future
With Tinker’s launch, Thinking Machines Lab is betting that the next frontier in AI lies not in building ever-larger models, but in democratizing access to advanced capabilities through fine-tuning tools. The platform currently allows users to customize Meta’s Llama and Alibaba’s Qwen models using just a few lines of code, handling the complexity of distributed training that typically requires specialized expertise and significant computing resources.
“We believe [Tinker] will help empower researchers and developers to experiment with models and will make frontier capabilities much more accessible to all people,” Murati told Wired. The company plans to release additional scientific findings to help the broader research community understand frontier AI systems.
As the AI industry continues to evolve at breakneck speed, Murati’s approach offers a compelling alternative to the winner-take-all dynamics that have come to define Silicon Valley. Whether Thinking Machines Lab can maintain this independence while scaling its technology and influence remains to be seen, but Murati’s track record suggests she’s building something designed to last.
Last June, Murati discussed a wide range of topics at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women dinner in San Francisco, including the Apple partnership, safety and privacy concerns, how she found her love for AI, and more. You can watch the full conversation below.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
For Mark Zuckerberg, the most significant creation from his two years at Harvard University wasn’t the precursor to a global social network, but a prank website that nearly got him expelled.
The Meta CEO said in a 2017 commencement address at his alma mater that the controversial site, Facemash, was “the most important thing I built in my time here” for one simple reason: it led him to his wife, Priscilla Chan.
“Without Facemash I wouldn’t have met Priscilla, and she’s the most important person in my life,” Zuckerberg said during the speech.
In 2003, Zuckerberg, then a sophomore, created Facemash by hacking into Harvard’s online student directories and using the photos to create a site where users could rank students’ attractiveness. The site went viral, but it was quickly shut down by the university. Zuckerberg was called before Harvard’s Administrative Board, facing accusations of breaching security, violating copyrights, and infringing on individual privacy.
“Everyone thought I was going to get kicked out,” Zuckerberg recalled in his speech. “My parents came to help me pack. My friends threw me a going-away party.”
It was at this party, thrown by friends who believed his expulsion was imminent, where he met Chan, another Harvard undergraduate. “We met in line for the bathroom in the Pfoho Belltower, and in what must be one of the all time romantic lines, I said: ‘I’m going to get kicked out in three days, so we need to go on a date quickly,’” Zuckerberg said.
Chan, who described her now-husband to The New Yorker as “this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there,” went on the date with him. Zuckerberg did not get expelled from Harvard after all, but he did famously drop out the following year to focus on building Facebook.
While the 2010 film The Social Network portrayed Facemash as a critical stepping stone to the creation of Facebook, Zuckerberg himself has downplayed its technical or conceptual importance.
“And, you know, that movie made it seem like Facemash was so important to creating Facebook. It wasn’t,” he said during his commencement speech. But he did confirm that the series of events it set in motion—the administrative hearing, the “going-away” party, the line for the bathroom—ultimately connected him with the mother of his three children.
Chan, for her part, went on to graduate from Harvard in 2007, taught science, and then attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, becoming a pediatrician.
She and Zuckerberg got married in 2012, and in 2015, they co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization focused on leveraging technology to address major world challenges in health, education, and science. Chan serves as co-CEO of the initiative, which has pledged to give away 99% of the couple’s shares in Meta Platforms to fund its work.
You can watch the entirety of Zuckerberg’s Harvard commencement speech below:
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) is a nonpartisan watchdog that regularly estimates how much the U.S. Congress is adding to the $38 trillion national debt.
With enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies due to expire within days, some Senate Democrats are scrambling to protect millions of Americans from getting the unpleasant holiday gift of spiking health insurance premiums. The CRFB says there’s just one problem with the plan: It’s not funded.
“With the national debt as large as the economy and interest payments costing $1 trillion annually, it is absurd to suggest adding hundreds of billions more to the debt,” CRFB President Maya MacGuineas wrote in a statement on Friday afternoon.
The proposal, backed by members of the Senate Democratic caucus, would fully extend the enhanced ACA subsidies for three years, from 2026 through 2028, with no additional income limits on who can qualify. Those subsidies, originally boosted during the pandemic and later renewed, were designed to lower premiums and prevent coverage losses for middle‑ and lower‑income households purchasing insurance on the ACA exchanges.
CRFB estimated that even this three‑year extension alone would add roughly $300 billion to federal deficits over the next decade, largely because the federal government would continue to shoulder a larger share of premium costs while enrollment and subsidy amounts remain elevated. If Congress ultimately moves to make the enhanced subsidies permanent—as many advocates have urged—the total cost could swell to nearly $550 billion in additional borrowing over the next decade.
Reversing recent guardrails
MacGuineas called the Senate bill “far worse than even a debt-financed extension” as it would roll back several “program integrity” measures that were enacted as part of a 2025 reconciliation law and were intended to tighten oversight of ACA subsidies. On top of that, it would be funded by borrowing even more. “This is a bad idea made worse,” MacGuineas added.
The watchdog group’s central critique is that the new Senate plan does not attempt to offset its costs through spending cuts or new revenue and, in their view, goes beyond a simple extension by expanding the underlying subsidy structure.
The legislation would permanently repeal restrictions that eliminated subsidies for certain groups enrolling during special enrollment periods and would scrap rules requiring full repayment of excess advance subsidies and stricter verification of eligibility and tax reconciliation. The bill would also nullify portions of a 2025 federal regulation that loosened limits on the actuarial value of exchange plans and altered how subsidies are calculated, effectively reshaping how generous plans can be and how federal support is determined. CRFB warned these reversals would increase costs further while weakening safeguards designed to reduce misuse and error in the subsidy system.
MacGuineas said that any subsidy extension should be paired with broader reforms to curb health spending and reduce overall borrowing. In her view, lawmakers are missing a chance to redesign ACA support in a way that lowers premiums while also improving the long‑term budget outlook.
The debate over ACA subsidies recently contributed to a government funding standoff, and CRFB argued that the new Senate bill reflects a political compromise that prioritizes short‑term relief over long‑term fiscal responsibility.
“After a pointless government shutdown over this issue, it is beyond disappointing that this is the preferred solution to such an important issue,” MacGuineas wrote.
The off-year elections cast the government shutdown and cost-of-living arguments in a different light. Democrats made stunning gains and almost flipped a deep-red district in Tennessee as politicians from the far left and center coalesced around “affordability.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is reportedly smelling blood in the water and doubling down on the theme heading into the pivotal midterm elections of 2026. President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Pennsylvania soon to discuss pocketbook anxieties. But he is repeating predecessor Joe Biden’s habit of dismissing inflation, despite widespread evidence to the contrary.
“We fixed inflation, and we fixed almost everything,” Trump said in a Tuesday cabinet meeting, in which he also dismissed affordability as a “hoax” pushed by Democrats.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle now face a politically fraught choice: allow premiums to jump sharply—including in swing states like Pennsylvania where ACA enrollees face double‑digit increases—or pass an expensive subsidy extension that would, as CRFB calculates, explode the deficit without addressing underlying health care costs.
Netflix Inc. has won the heated takeover battle for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. Now it must convince global antitrust regulators that the deal won’t give it an illegal advantage in the streaming market.
The $72 billion tie-up joins the world’s dominant paid streaming service with one of Hollywood’s most iconic movie studios. It would reshape the market for online video content by combining the No. 1 streaming player with the No. 4 service HBO Max and its blockbuster hits such as Game Of Thrones, Friends, and the DC Universe comics characters franchise.
That could raise red flags for global antitrust regulators over concerns that Netflix would have too much control over the streaming market. The company faces a lengthy Justice Department review and a possible US lawsuit seeking to block the deal if it doesn’t adopt some remedies to get it cleared, analysts said.
“Netflix will have an uphill climb unless it agrees to divest HBO Max as well as additional behavioral commitments — particularly on licensing content,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jennifer Rie. “The streaming overlap is significant,” she added, saying the argument that “the market should be viewed more broadly is a tough one to win.”
By choosing Netflix, Warner Bros. has jilted another bidder, Paramount Skydance Corp., a move that risks touching off a political battle in Washington. Paramount is backed by the world’s second-richest man, Larry Ellison, and his son, David Ellison, and the company has touted their longstanding close ties to President Donald Trump. Their acquisition of Paramount, which closed in August, has won public praise from Trump.
Comcast Corp. also made a bid for Warner Bros., looking to merge it with its NBCUniversal division.
The Justice Department’s antitrust division, which would review the transaction in the US, could argue that the deal is illegal on its face because the combined market share would put Netflix well over a 30% threshold.
The White House, the Justice Department and Comcast didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
US lawmakers from both parties, including Republican Representative Darrell Issa and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren have already faulted the transaction — which would create a global streaming giant with 450 million users — as harmful to consumers.
“This deal looks like an anti-monopoly nightmare,” Warren said after the Netflix announcement. Utah Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, said in a social media post earlier this week that a Warner Bros.-Netflix tie-up would raise more serious competition questions “than any transaction I’ve seen in about a decade.”
European Union regulators are also likely to subject the Netflix proposal to an intensive review amid pressure from legislators. In the UK, the deal has already drawn scrutiny before the announcement, with House of Lords member Baroness Luciana Berger pressing the government on how the transaction would impact competition and consumer prices.
The combined company could raise prices and broadly impact “culture, film, cinemas and theater releases,”said Andreas Schwab, a leading member of the European Parliament on competition issues, after the announcement.
Paramount has sought to frame the Netflix deal as a non-starter. “The simple truth is that a deal with Netflix as the buyer likely will never close, due to antitrust and regulatory challenges in the United States and in most jurisdictions abroad,” Paramount’s antitrust lawyers wrote to their counterparts at Warner Bros. on Dec. 1.
Appealing directly to Trump could help Netflix avoid intense antitrust scrutiny, New Street Research’s Blair Levin wrote in a note on Friday. Levin said it’s possible that Trump could come to see the benefit of switching from a pro-Paramount position to a pro-Netflix position. “And if he does so, we believe the DOJ will follow suit,” Levin wrote.
Netflix co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos had dinner with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last December, a move other CEOs made after the election in order to win over the administration. In a call with investors Friday morning, Sarandos said that he’s “highly confident in the regulatory process,” contending the deal favors consumers, workers and innovation.
“Our plans here are to work really closely with all the appropriate governments and regulators, but really confident that we’re going to get all the necessary approvals that we need,” he said.
Netflix will likely argue to regulators that other video services such as Google’s YouTube and ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok should be included in any analysis of the market, which would dramatically shrink the company’s perceived dominance.
The US Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the transfer of broadcast-TV licenses, isn’t expected to play a role in the deal, as neither hold such licenses. Warner Bros. plans to spin off its cable TV division, which includes channels such as CNN, TBS and TNT, before the sale.
Even if antitrust reviews just focus on streaming, Netflix believes it will ultimately prevail, pointing to Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime and Walt Disney Co. as other major competitors, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking.
Netflix is expected to argue that more than 75% of HBO Max subscribers already subscribe to Netflix, making them complementary offerings rather than competitors, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing confidential deliberations. The company is expected to make the case that reducing its content costs through owning Warner Bros., eliminating redundant back-end technology and bundling Netflix with Max will yield lower prices.
Politics8 years ago