Mira Murati creating Her with Thinking Machines, year after she broke up with OpenAI and Sam Altman
Mira Murati, former OpenAI CTO who founded Thinking Machines in 2025, is building a new AI system that interacts with users almost like a human would. In demos released on Tuesday, it comes across as something that we saw in the movie Her.
We all know Sam Altman. He is the CEO of OpenAI, one of its co-founders, and now almost a household name. But not many know of Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI who has been a key figure behind almost everything that OpenAI offers to consumers at the moment. Mira had a fallout with OpenAI and Sam Altman, and in 2025 she started her own company called Thinking Machines. Now the company is back with a new kind of AI system, the one that is more interactive and seems almost like something we saw in the movie Her.
That Mira is cooking something is evident from the money that Thinking Machines has raised since February 2025. In no time, the company has attracted big-time investors and in just a little over a year it is said to be seeking investment at a valuation of over $50 billion. Now, we might know why Thinking Machines is attracting the attention of big tech investors. The company is working on a new kind of AI system, which seems significantly ahead of others, including Claude and ChatGPT.
In demos posted on Tuesday, Thinking Machines showed that it is working on a more interactive AI that would work and talk with humans in real-time, without prompts and prods. In other words, it would act like a perfect virtual companion, whether for work or for something personal. The demos show the AI analysing the environment around a user, and based on what it was perceiving, giving inputs to users. The demos also showed that the Thinking Machine can do natural and asymmetric conversations with users, just like the way humans talk.
“People are most effective when they can collaborate with AI the same way we do with other people: messaging, talking, listening, seeing, showing, and interjecting as needed — and for the model to do the same,” noted Thinking Machines in a blog post. “Interaction models let people collaborate with AI the way we naturally collaborate with each other—they continuously take in audio, video, and text, and think, respond, and act in real time.”
In some ways, and at least that is what demos hint at, the interactive AI from Thinking Machines seems like a basic version of the AI that we saw in the movie Her. It may not seem as advanced yet, but it is definitely taking that same direction that the AI, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, showed in that movie.
Announcing their new AI, Mira said: “Today we're sharing our work on interaction models. A new class of model trained from scratch to handle real-time interaction natively, instead of gluing it onto a turn-based one.”
Mira Murati, who is Albanian and not Indian as the name might suggest, had a fallout with OpenAI and Sam Altman in late 2023 when the OpenAI Board tried to oust Altman. Mira was part of the Board, and she even served as interim CEO for two days before Microsoft Satya Nadella helped Sam Altman come back to OpenAI and regain control. After that incident a number of OpenAI insiders left. The company’s chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left in June 2024, while Mira left a few months after that. In February 2025, she started Thinking Machines.
We all know Sam Altman. He is the CEO of OpenAI, one of its co-founders, and now almost a household name. But not many know of Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI who has been a key figure behind almost everything that OpenAI offers to consumers at the moment. Mira had a fallout with OpenAI and Sam Altman, and in 2025 she started her own company called Thinking Machines. Now the company is back with a new kind of AI system, the one that is more interactive and seems almost like something we saw in the movie Her.
That Mira is cooking something is evident from the money that Thinking Machines has raised since February 2025. In no time, the company has attracted big-time investors and in just a little over a year it is said to be seeking investment at a valuation of over $50 billion. Now, we might know why Thinking Machines is attracting the attention of big tech investors. The company is working on a new kind of AI system, which seems significantly ahead of others, including Claude and ChatGPT.
In demos posted on Tuesday, Thinking Machines showed that it is working on a more interactive AI that would work and talk with humans in real-time, without prompts and prods. In other words, it would act like a perfect virtual companion, whether for work or for something personal. The demos show the AI analysing the environment around a user, and based on what it was perceiving, giving inputs to users. The demos also showed that the Thinking Machine can do natural and asymmetric conversations with users, just like the way humans talk.
“People are most effective when they can collaborate with AI the same way we do with other people: messaging, talking, listening, seeing, showing, and interjecting as needed — and for the model to do the same,” noted Thinking Machines in a blog post. “Interaction models let people collaborate with AI the way we naturally collaborate with each other—they continuously take in audio, video, and text, and think, respond, and act in real time.”
In some ways, and at least that is what demos hint at, the interactive AI from Thinking Machines seems like a basic version of the AI that we saw in the movie Her. It may not seem as advanced yet, but it is definitely taking that same direction that the AI, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, showed in that movie.
Announcing their new AI, Mira said: “Today we're sharing our work on interaction models. A new class of model trained from scratch to handle real-time interaction natively, instead of gluing it onto a turn-based one.”
Mira Murati, who is Albanian and not Indian as the name might suggest, had a fallout with OpenAI and Sam Altman in late 2023 when the OpenAI Board tried to oust Altman. Mira was part of the Board, and she even served as interim CEO for two days before Microsoft Satya Nadella helped Sam Altman come back to OpenAI and regain control. After that incident a number of OpenAI insiders left. The company’s chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left in June 2024, while Mira left a few months after that. In February 2025, she started Thinking Machines.
