Jobs at Thinking Machines Lab

Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence research and product company. We're building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals.

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. We're excited that in the next couple months we’ll be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models. Soon, we’ll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems.

To accelerate our progress, we’re happy to confirm that we’ve raised $2B led by a16z with participation from NVIDIA, Accel, ServiceNow, CISCO, AMD, Jane Street and more who share our mission.

While AI capabilities have advanced dramatically, key gaps remain. The scientific community's understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities. Knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and people's abilities to use AI effectively. And, despite their potential, these systems remain difficult for people to customize to their specific needs and values. To bridge the gaps, we're building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable.

We are scientists, engineers, and builders who've created some of the most widely used AI products, including ChatGPT and Character.ai, open-weights models like Mistral, as well as popular open source projects like PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq, and Segment Anything.

Thinking Machines Lab has assembled one of the most formidable teams in AI, led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and joined by ChatGPT co-creator John Schulman, safety lead Lilian Weng, and other senior researchers who helped define the state of the art in multimodal, safety, and training methods. Their vision is “collaborative general intelligence,” a multimodal system that communicates and works the way people do, and they plan to ship an open-source-friendly product within months. By emphasizing openness and developer accessibility, the company positions itself as a counterweight to the closed approaches of incumbents like OpenAI and Anthropic, which have triggered growing discontent among startups and researchers.

The $2 billion seed round, valuing the company at $12 billion, is the largest in venture history and provides the team with a multi-year runway of compute and capital. Backers include a16z, NVIDIA, AMD, Cisco, and Jane Street, underscoring both deep-pocketed institutional conviction and strategic alignment with GPU suppliers. The bet is ultimately on talent: this group has repeatedly proven its ability to set industry standards, and with resources secured, it has the time and freedom to pursue frontier breakthroughs without the immediate pressure of commercialization. While the technical and regulatory hurdles of surpassing GPT-4-level models are enormous, Thinking Machines Lab has the people, capital, and market timing to credibly challenge incumbents and shape the next era of foundation models.

Written as of August 2025