Mira Murati and Thinking Machines Lab: Nvidia Invests in Ex-OpenAI Chief's New Venture

The Best People Are Leaving Big Tech

Nvidia has made a "significant investment" in Thinking Machines Lab, the AI company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. The partnership includes a multi-year agreement where Thinking Machines commits to one gigawatt of Nvidia compute. The company has now raised over $2 billion in total since it was founded in February 2025.

Relevance

Thinking Machines Lab is on track to become a serious competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic — with heavy industry capital behind it.

My assessment

What I notice here is the pattern: the best people are leaving Big Tech and building something new with massive capital behind them. That means the AI market is becoming more, not less, fragmented. For a CIO, this means betting everything on one vendor today is naive — the architecture must be modular and vendor-agnostic.