Mira Murati, the founder of Thinking Machines Lab (TML), turned down Mark Zuckerberg’s $1 billion dream job offer to join Meta’s Superintelligence team.
According to Wired, Meta approached other people from the AI startup with a staggering offer ranging from $200 million to $1 billion. Not even a single member of the TML team accepted these offers.
Andy Stone, Meta’s communication director, gave a rebuttal on the platform Threads while disputing with some figures.
“This reporting isn’t right in various ways. We made offers only to a handful of people at TML, and while there was one sizeable offer, the details are off,” Stone said.
Mira Murati, formerly served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and interim CEO at OpenAI, has emerged as one of the leading figures in the global AI race.
Murati’s AI start-up, Thinking Machines Lab (TML), was founded in February 2025. The company aimed to make AI more understandable and customised for practical application through Human-AI collaboration.
The Albanian-American tech lady has not yet released any product but secured $2 billion in seed funding, valuing the TML at $12 billion. Mira brought with her several co-founders from Open-AI:
The tech founder was called “AI brain” for her expertise in managing a team during the innovation phases of OpenAI. Thinking Machine Lab is now an emerging star in AI startup tech.
Mira also served at Tesla, Goldman Sachs, and Zodiac Aerospace. She became a member of OpenAI in 2018 and helped in the development of groundbreaking tools Codex, DALL-E, and ChatGPT.
Meta is pushing to bring on board leading AI figures in the newly created Superintelligence team. However, Murati and her team rejected the mouth-watering offers, signalling their confidence in the new AI venture.
Mira played a significant role in the development of groundbreaking technologies like ChatGPT, Codex, and DALL-E.