Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence company founded by top researchers who fled OpenAI, has raised a record $2 billion seed round that values the fledgling firm at $12 billion.

The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included Nvidia, Accel, Cisco, and AMD—among others. The mammoth investment reflects the ultracompetitive race to build advanced AI systems, as well as the premium placed on top AI talent. It is the largest seed funding round in history.

Thinking Machines is led by CEO Mira Murati, who stepped down as OpenAI’s chief technology officer last September. Her cofounders are John Schulman, a computer scientist who helped build ChatGPT; Barrett Zoph, ex-vice president of research at OpenAI; Lilian Weng, who worked on AI safety and robotics at the company, Andrew Tulloch, who worked on pretraining and reasoning; and Luke Metz, who worked on post-training at OpenAI. Thinking Machines Lab confirmed the team to WIRED on Tuesday, the first time it has publicly done so.

Murati said in a post on X on Tuesday that Thinking Machines is developing multimodal AI that will interact with humans “through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate.” She added that the company will release its first product within the next few months, noting that the release “will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models.” She said that the company would also release research “to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems.”

In just over a decade, AI has gone from a research backwater to a high-stakes and high-drama investment, recruitment, and dealmaking frenzy.

The drama reached a new level in recent months as talk of AI firms like OpenAI nearing human or superhuman level AI intensified. (Thinking Machines Lab has been notably quiet on that front—at least so far).

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also shaken up the industry by luring top researchers to a new superintelligence lab with promises of multimillion dollar pay packages. Zuckerberg has succeeded in bringing several OpenAI researchers over to the new project. Given their prominence and expertise, Thinking Machines’ cofounders are highly likely to have been approached. The company declined to comment on the matter, however.

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