Thinkunes Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence company founded by top researchers fleeing Openai, has raised a record $2 billion seed round, focusing on the fledgling company for $12 billion.
The funding round is led by Andreessen Horowitz, including Nvidia, Accel, Cisco and AMD (Others). Mammoth investment reflects the super competition for building advanced AI systems and the advanced competition for top AI talents. This is the largest seed fund in history.
Thinking Machines is led by CEO Mira Murati, who resigned as the chief technology officer of OpenAI last September. Her co-founder is John Schulman, a computer scientist who helped establish Chatgpt. Barrett Zoph, former research president at Openai; Lilian Weng, who works in the company’s AI security and robotics; Andrew Tulloch, his training and reasoning. Luke Metz works after training in Openai. Thinking Machines Lab confirmed the team’s connection Tuesday, the first time it has been publicly done.
Murati said in an article on X on Tuesday that the mind machine is developing multimodal AI that will “talk through dialogue, through vision, through our collaborative means”. She added that the company will release its first product in the coming months, noting that the release “will include an important open source component that is useful for researchers and startups developing custom models.” She said the company will also release research “help the research community to better understand the Frontier AI system.”
In just a decade, AI has shifted from post-research water to a high-risk and advanced theatrical investment, recruitment and trading frenzy.
The show has reached new levels in recent months, with discussions on human or superhuman or superhuman AI like Openai intensifying. (The Thinking Machine Lab is very quiet in this regard, at least so far).
Fung Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg also promises millions of dollars in compensation packages by attracting top researchers into a new super smart lab. Zuckerberg successfully brought several OpenAI researchers to a new project. Given their popularity and expertise, it is very likely that the co-founders of the Thinking Machine are approached. However, the company declined to comment on the matter.
