Thinking Machines Labs Lifts the Curtain: Multimodal AI for “Collaborative General Intelligence”
- Niv Nissenson
- Jul 16
- 5 min read
Just weeks after shattering records with a $2 billion seed round — the largest ever by a wide margin — Thinking Machines Labs, the secretive San Francisco startup founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is finally starting to reveal what it’s building and looks like our assessment that they're building their own ChatGPT was largely on point although their ambitions seem greater than that.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Murati laid out the vision:
“We’re building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world — through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate.” (full tweet below)
The first product, expected in the next couple of months (that sounds really fast), will include a significant open-source component designed to support researchers and startups building custom models. Murati also promised to share the company’s best science to help the broader AI community understand frontier systems. It's unclear how Multimodal their first product will actually be.
What is “multimodal AI”?
Simply put, multimodal AI systems can process and combine multiple types of input — text, images, maybe video or even audio — to understand or generate responses. For example, OpenAI’s GPT-4V (vision) can look at an image and answer questions about it, while Google DeepMind’s Gemini is designed to handle both language and image reasoning.
Thinking Machines Labs is less than a year old, yet it’s already making waves, largely thanks to its pedigree: the startup was founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and is stacked with former OpenAI engineers and researchers. Their own team chart (see below) reads like an OpenAI alumni roster, underscoring just how much this ambitious new player draws from the original builders of ChatGPT.
TheMarketAI.com Take:It’s unclear whether Thinking Machines’ “first product” will truly be a fully multimodal system—building that typically takes longer than a few months to come out with such a breakthrough. More likely, we’ll see them unveil their own foundational LLM, laying the groundwork for the richer multimodal collaboration they promise.
Meanwhile, on prediction markets like Polymarket, Google still leads the pack for “Best AI model by end of 2025,” with OpenAI trailing at 26% and xAI at 15%. We’ll be watching closely to see if Thinking Machines earns a spot on the scoreboard in the coming months.
Thinking Machines founding team (source: https://thinkingmachines.ai):
