Sabrina Ortiz

Mira Murati left OpenAI to take AI systems in a different direction, but recent events are calling the startup's direction into question — and the timing couldn’t be worse.

Thinking Machines made headlines last week after a wave of resignations from its top talent. On Wednesday, Murati announced in an internal meeting that she had fired one of the company’s co-founders, CTO Barrett Zoph, for “poor performance and talking to competitors,” according to a report from The Information. During the same meeting, two more Thinking Machines researchers, Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz, put in their resignations via Slack, according to the same report.

Following this announcement, on Thursday, another two Thinking Machine employees, researcher Lia Guy and engineer Ian O’Connell, announced their departures. The kicker: four of these five departing employees went to OpenAI.

While aggressive poaching is standard practice in the AI industry, as seen in the ongoing talent wars between Meta and OpenAI, several unique factors make this specific exodus particularly critical for Thinking Machines.

• As highlighted by The Information, the departures included two of the six original co-founders. This followed the departure of Andrew Tulloch, yet another co-founder, who left for Meta in the fall.
• Like all AI research startups, Thinking Machines needs to raise lots of capital to stay afloat, a pressure exacerbated by the fact that it is one year old and has unveiled only one product since its inception.
• This comes at a time when the company is seeking to raise $5 billion, five times its last round, and would value it at $50 billion.
• These employee departures could be interpreted as a lack of confidence in the company's trajectory and could impact investor sentiment. This reality is already becoming true, with investors reporting they are rattled, as noted in the report.