Mira Murati: Former CTO of OpenAI
Ermira “Mira” Murati is a pioneering AI engineer, entrepreneur, and global thought leader advancing accessible, human-centered artificial intelligence through transformative innovation and public education.
Quick Facts:
- Highlights:
- Founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, a public benefit AI research and product company
- Former Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, leading the development of ChatGPT and frontier AI systems
- Named to Time’s 100 Most Influential People in AI (2024)
- Recognized global speaker on AI accessibility, responsible innovation, and the future of technology
- Formats: Keynote speaker, AI engineer, entrepreneur, and innovation leader.
- Audiences: Tech conferences, corporate innovation teams, policymakers, educators, research institutions, and organisations seeking clarity, vision, and strategy for the future of AI.
- Outcomes:
- Clear understanding of cutting-edge AI and its real-world applications
- Strategic insights on responsible innovation, safety, and scalable impact
- Inspiration to adopt a future-forward mindset and integrate AI with confidence and purpose
- Travels from: San Francisco, CA
- **Fee range: $250,000 - $500,000
Talent Services
Keynote Topics:
Topics of Expertise
- The Future of Artificial Intelligence
- Ethics in AI and Responsible Innovation
- Bridging the Gap Between AI and Society
- AI for Good: Public Benefit & Policy
- Women in Technology & Leadership
- Human-Centered AI Design
Talent Short Bio
Ermira “Mira” Murati is an Albanian-born engineer, entrepreneur, and visionary leader widely recognized for shaping the modern era of artificial intelligence. As the Founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, a public benefit corporation launched in 2025, Mira is dedicated to creating advanced AI tools that are understandable, usable, and beneficial to everyday people. Her mission is to close the widening gap between rapid AI innovation and public comprehension, ensuring the technology is developed with transparency, accessibility, and societal impact at its core.
Before founding her own lab, Mira served as Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, where she helped lead the development of some of the most influential AI systems in the world, including ChatGPT and other frontier models. Her technical expertise and human-centered leadership have shaped global conversations around safety, governance, and the responsible deployment of AI at scale.
Named to Time’s 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2024, Mira is a sought-after keynote speaker known for her clarity, strategic insight, and ability to make complex technological concepts accessible for diverse audiences. She champions a future where AI empowers creativity, enhances education, elevates human potential, and strengthens society.
Read Full Bio
Ermira “Mira” Murati is an influential Albanian-born engineer, entrepreneur, and one of the most prominent voices in artificial intelligence (AI) today. With a track record of spearheading world-changing AI initiatives, Mira is committed to making advanced AI accessible, ethical, and understandable for the public.
In early 2025, she founded Thinking Machines Lab, a public benefit corporation focused on closing the gap between rapidly evolving AI technologies and the real-world understanding and responsible use of them. Her work continues to shape the future of AI through innovation, transparency, and public engagement.
As the former Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, Mira Murati was instrumental in the development and launch of industry-leading technologies, including ChatGPT. Her leadership helped shape OpenAI into a global powerhouse for ethical AI research and deployment.
In her seven years at OpenAI, Mira’s impact was profound. Joining initially as Vice President of Applied AI and Partnerships, she quickly rose through the ranks to lead the company’s research, product and safety divisions. As CTO, she oversaw the development of ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex and Sora, four of the most transformative AI products ever released. Under her direction, OpenAI evolved from a research initiative into a household name synonymous with the AI revolution. Mira also briefly served as interim CEO, a role that highlighted her leadership during one of the organisation’s most turbulent moments. Her time at OpenAI established her as both a technical innovator and a strategic leader capable of navigating complex ethical and business challenges.
After leaving OpenAI, Mira Murati launched Thinking Machines Lab, a public benefit corporation dedicated to making AI systems more customisable, transparent and inclusive. The company attracted some of the best engineers and researchers from leading tech firms and secured $2 billion in seed funding, valuing it at $12 billion. Its first product, Tinker, allows developers and researchers to fine-tune large language models with ease, furthering Mira’s mission to democratise AI.
As a keynote speaker, Mira Murati shares her expertise on AI ethics, innovation, governance and the future of intelligent systems, offering audiences a rare perspective from someone who has shaped the field from the inside out.
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Talent Videos
Mira Murati on DALL·E 2 and the Power of AI | The Daily Show
In this 7 minute and 50 second interview, Mira Murati explains how DALL·E works, the promise and risks of generative AI, and the ethical challenges shaping the future of creativity, misinformation, and human purpose.
Video Summary & Key Moments
Mira Murati joins The Daily Show to demystify how generative AI systems like DALL·E create original images. She explains that while many assume AI “copies” existing artwork, the model instead learns patterns across vast datasets of images and descriptions. Through this pattern learning, it can generate images that have never existed before, using relationships between text and visual concepts to produce original creations.
The conversation shifts to concerns raised by artists and creative professionals. Trevor Noah cites an art competition where an AI-assisted piece won, prompting debates about what counts as “real” art. Mira acknowledges these tensions and notes that OpenAI views systems like GPT-3 and DALL·E as tools—extensions of human creativity rather than replacements. She draws a parallel to ancient myths about helpers with extraordinary abilities, emphasising that innovation has always required balancing power with awareness of vulnerabilities.
Trevor highlights DALL·E’s ability not only to generate images but to expand existing ones, as in its reimagining of The Girl with the Pearl Earring. Mira describes this as an expansion of imagination itself, removing the constraints of canvas and allowing users to explore new creative possibilities.
The discussion then turns to misinformation. Mira outlines OpenAI’s guardrails, including removing public figures from training datasets and applying filters that block prompts involving violence, hate, or policy violations. While she stresses the importance of bringing the public into conversations about AI’s capabilities, she admits that misinformation remains one of the most difficult challenges.
Key Moments
- 01:30 Discussion of artist concerns and AI as a tool extending human creativity.
- 03:05 Exploration of DALL·E’s ability to expand famous artworks and inspire imagination.
- 04:20 Mira describes OpenAI’s guardrails designed to limit misinformation and harmful outputs.
AI's Human Factor | Stanford's Dr. Fei-Fei Li and OpenAI CTO Mira Murati
In this 32-minute conversation, Fei-Fei Li and Mira Murati explore the rapidly evolving frontier of AI capabilities, robotics, alignment, governance, and the balance between innovation and safety—offering one of the clearest windows into how global AI leaders are navigating technology that is progressing faster than our frameworks for managing it.
Video Summary & Key Moments
This wide-ranging discussion brings together two of the world’s leading AI thinkers—Stanford’s Dr. Fei-Fei Li and OpenAI CTO Mira Murati—to unpack what’s most exciting in AI today and how the field must evolve to remain safe, human-centered, and beneficial.
What Excites Them Right Now
Fei-Fei Li describes a major new effort in robotic learning, where her team is developing a benchmark of 1,000 real-world robotic tasks grounded in how humans actually spend time (from government surveys of time-use). Rather than “toy tasks,” these benchmarks reflect everyday human needs—cleaning toilets ranks high; opening Christmas presents does not. She says robotics today feels like early-stage ImageNet: a foundational moment that could reshape the field.
Mira Murati highlights the continued progress of the scaling paradigm—large neural networks + massive compute + vast datasets—and how this formula has unlocked leaps in linguistic intelligence and visual understanding. The long-term goal, she notes, is AI systems that hold shared, human-like concepts of the world across modalities.
Key Moments
- 3:10 AI Paradigm
- 5:18 Creating Safety Norms
- 8:35 Human-Centered AI
- 11:45 Beyond the Model
- 15:07 AI Research Ethics
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