Mira Moratti is cautiously returning to the spotlight

Mira Moratti is not a natural creature on the convention stage. As CTO of OpenAI, she was present but rarely the public face of the company. As CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, finding her was even more difficult. So when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday — her first major media appearance in nearly 18 months — it was worth paying attention to, even if she was careful not to say too much.

The timing makes sense. Thinking Machines has spent the better part of a year and a half operating largely in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers, and shipping a single product, Tinker, an open-source AI model tuning API.

Meanwhile, companies competing for the same talent, clients, and headlines are becoming more ubiquitous. OpenAI, where Moratti spent six years as CTO, constantly pops up in the news cycle. Human momentum is all anyone can talk about now. xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence project, has been integrated into SpaceX ahead of what is expected to be a massive public offering, generating its own pull for interest and investment. In that environment, sitting idly by has diminishing returns; At some point, you have to make some noise just to remind the market that you exist.

Moratti used Bloomberg’s guise to do just that, and not much more. It demonstrated what Thinking Machines calls “interaction models,” which it described as a very different kind of AI interface. Instead of the gyrating dynamism and rapid response that define most AI products today, she told interviewer Emily Chang, the company’s models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text and video in 200-millisecond time frames. The idea is that they can capture the texture of human communication — the interruptions, mid-thought corrections, even pauses for thought — in something closer to real time. But Moratti was careful to portray it as a first step, rather than a finished product, and declined to give anything a specific release date.

She also answered questions about the episode that first put her in the public eye: the chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO. Within OpenAI it has come to be called “image”. Moratti said she felt clear about her decisions at every moment, and that protecting the mission and the team was the dividing line that made the choices seem clear even when the situation looked like it was falling apart from the outside. She said the company “would have exploded” had she not been involved during that bizarre five-day period and its immediate aftermath. But she acknowledged that clarity of intentions is not the same as clarity about consequences. She said that in retrospect, she would have pushed harder for more information, a better transition plan, and more transparency. What she didn’t say, at least not directly, was whether she thought things went well.

When asked if she still trusted her former boss, she sidestepped the question, steering the conversation toward a larger concern she returned to many times: the concentration of relevant decisions in the hands of too few — not just at OpenAI but across the industry. She said her concern was less about the personality of any individual leader (although she acknowledged that was important) and more about the lack of structural controls. Good people make bad calls. Well-intentioned organizations get carried away. She suggested that too much attention was paid to virtue and too little attention to governance.

Zhang also politely pressed her about the departure of several prominent researchers from Thinking Machines in recent months, a topic Moratti has largely avoided in public, and downplayed on Thursday. First, she said, building a leading AI lab from scratch condenses years of normal regulatory fluctuations into months. She also acknowledged that compensation — the nine-figure packages that have become standard currency in the war for AI talent — captures people’s imagination, but noted that it’s not usually the whole story. Amid some audience laughter, she said of her competitive instincts: “When I wake up in the morning, I don’t think about how to kill the competitor.”

Naturally, Chang wondered what comes next for AI on a large scale, including humans who AI companies once said would be empowered by AI but have recently become fearful of due to talk of mass job displacement, not to mention a future where AI is used to make chemical weapons.

Moratti, who was born in Albania and speaks with a slight Eastern European accent, was thoughtful. I fall back on the framing of an inevitable dystopia or an inevitable utopia, arguing that neither outcome is predetermined and that the period we are in now is the period that will determine the direction in which things will go. However, she said – and not for the first time during the interview – that if humans took their hands off the wheel too soon, the future would look very different, not better.