Mira Murati

There are people who make the science and people who put it in the world's hands. Mira Murati belongs in that second category, with an unusual precision: she did both at once. Born in Vlorë, Albania, in 1988, she emigrated at 16 on a scholarship to the United World College in Canada, and from there made her way to Dartmouth, where she studied mechanical engineering. Not the typical path for someone who ends up as CTO of the most influential AI company on the planet, and that says everything about her.

In November 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT to the world, Mira was the person responsible for product and technology behind that moment. Under her leadership, DALL-E 2, GPT-4, and GPT-4o (the multimodal model that can see, hear, and speak at the same time) were also released. These weren't just technical updates: they were the moments that showed millions of people that generative AI wasn't science fiction. In November 2023, when OpenAI's board briefly ousted Sam Altman, Murati stepped in as interim CEO, demonstrating the trust the organization placed in her during its most turbulent hour.

In September 2024 she announced she was leaving OpenAI to "do my own exploration." In February 2025 she founded Thinking Machines Lab with the goal of building multimodal AI that interacts with the world the way people do: through voice, through vision, and naturally. The same month she announced the company, she already had John Schulman (OpenAI co-founder) as Chief Scientist and Barret Zoph as CTO. In July 2025 she closed a $2 billion round, making it one of the most well-funded AI startups in history. In June 2024, Dartmouth awarded her an honorary Doctor of Science for "having democratized technology and advanced a better, safer world for us all."

To me, Mira Murati represents something we sometimes forget: that between "inventing the technology" and "getting it to you and me" there is enormous work of vision, product craft, and courage. She did it with ChatGPT, which changed how you work, how you learn, and how you create. Now she's doing it again, this time on her own terms. If you use Claude to write, organize ideas, or solve problems, part of that mindset shift that made AI possible in your daily life carries the mark of people like Mira.