The undisputed

The undisputed baddest bitch in AI just broke 18 months of silence. And the best part is she came back from the dead with receipts and zero apologies. As she should. For a bit of background, Mira Murati is the woman who shipped ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Codex as the former CTO of OpenAI. She was the one who was actually running the technical side while Sam Altman was out doing the press tour. Then if you remember in 2023 when the board fired Sam, she was hired as interim CEO for five very chaotic days. And suddenly everyone knew her name. Less than a year later in 2024, she left OpenAI and started a company called Thinking Machines Lab, which quietly raised $2 billion, locked in about a gigawatt of Nvidia compute, and then went completely dark. Well, this week she's back. She finally sat down with Bloomberg and talked about something that she's calling "interaction models," which is essentially AI that processes audio, video, and text every 200 milliseconds, responds in under half a second, and actually follows a real conversation instead of just waiting for you to prompt it. The technical term for all of this, apparently, is full duplex. And the pitch is that AI should work the way that humans communicate. Interruptions, pauses, half-finished thoughts, and all that. But what's actually big return isn't this product launch, it's the fact that she also went after the entire AI industry on governance, saying that the real problem isn't just one bad actor. It's that you have a small subset of people making the majority of consequential decisions with very few structural checks. Hypothetically good people making bad calls. And she would know. Meanwhile, in the background, her co-founder and CTO, two other founding members of Thinking Machines Lab, and five other members of the team recently jumped ship. It's not looking good. Organizational volatility, but the market sees it as talent bleed because AI engineers aren't really incentivized to stay super long term at companies when they can get nine-figure packages at another company just down the road in Silicon Valley. So with Anthropic and OpenAI just filing to go public, and xAI also going public with SpaceX on Friday, Mira Murati's $2 billion that she raised for Thinking Machines Lab and her quiet conviction is only getting her so far. And clearly she knows it.