Founders used to be wedded to their companies. Now, anyone can be lured away for the right price. Since the middle of last year, there have been at least three major AI "acqui-hires" in Silicon Valley. Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI and brought on its CEO, Alexandr Wang; Google spent a cool $2.4 billion to license Windsurf's technology and fold its cofounders and research teams into DeepMind; and Nvidia wagered $20 billion on Groq's inference technology and hired its CEO and other staffers. The frontier AI labs, meanwhile, have been playing a high stakes and seemingly never-ending game of talent musical chairs.

Leaders at Mira Murati's startup believe Barret Zoph engaged in an incident of "serious misconduct." The details are now coming to light. Leaders at Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab confronted the startup's cofounder and former CTO, Barret Zoph, over an alleged relationship with another employee last summer, WIRED has learned. That relationship was likely the alleged "misconduct" that has been mentioned in prior reporting, including by WIRED . To protect the privacy of the individuals involved, WIRED is not naming the employee in question.

Thinking Machines Lab, led by a group of prominent former OpenAI researchers, is betting that fine-tuning cutting-edge models will be the next frontier in AI. Thinking Machines Lab, a heavily funded startup cofounded by prominent researchers from OpenAI, has revealed its first product--a tool called Tinker that automates the creation of custom frontier AI models. "We believe [Tinker] will help empower researchers and developers to experiment with models and will make frontier capabilities much more accessible to all people," said Mira Murati, cofounder and CEO of Thinking Machines, in an interview with WIRED ahead of the announcement. Big companies and academic labs already fine-tune open source AI models to create new variants that are optimized for specific tasks, like solving math problems, drafting legal agreements, or answering medical questions. Typically, this work involves acquiring and managing clusters of GPUs and using various software tools to ensure that large-scale training runs are stable and efficient.

Jonathan Lachman, the previous head of special projects at OpenAI, recently left to join a new artificial intelligence research lab founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, according to two people familiar with the discussions. It's the most high-profile hire Murati has made since leaving OpenAI in September last year to start the much-hyped venture, which is focused on the exploration of so-called artificial general intelligence. Murati has poached roughly 10 researchers and engineers in total so far from competitors including OpenAI, Character AI, and Google DeepMind. Her startup is still in its early stages--it doesn't have a name, nor a firm product direction, according to two people familiar with the company. Murati and Lachman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The OpenAI chaos took another twist on Monday morning as most of the company's staff threatened to quit unless the board resigns and reinstates former CEO Sam Altman and ex-president Greg Brockman. According to Wired and Kara Swisher, around 500 employees -- including several executives -- signed the letter. Swisher noted that OpenAI has 700 employees. Several of them, including Chief Technical Officer Mira Murati (who held the company's top job on an interim basis for less than a weekend), wrote on X early Monday that "OpenAI is nothing without its people." Breaking: 505 of 700 employees @OpenAI tell the board to resign.

Last month, I interviewed Sam Altman and Mira Murati of OpenAI. Now she is taking over his job. The ouster of OpenAI's Altman, one of tech's most visible chief executives, shocked the business and tech world on Friday. It also put the company's chief technology officer, Murati, in charge of tech's biggest and most daunting job: leading the AI pioneer without disrupting life as we know it.

Until the dramatic departure of OpenAI's cofounder and CEO Sam Altman Friday, Mira Murati was its chief technology officer--but you could also call her as its minister of truth. In addition to heading the teams that develop tools such as ChatGPT and Dall-E, it's been her job to make sure those products don't mislead people, show bias, or snuff out humanity altogether. This interview was conducted in July 2023 for WIRED's cover story on OpenAI. It is being published today after Sam Altman's sudden departure to provide a glimpse at the thinking of the powerful AI company's new boss. Steven Levy: How did you come to join OpenAI?

Fox News correspondent Grady Trimble has the latest on fears the technology will spiral out of control on'Special Report.' Artificial intelligence leader OpenAI has introduced the ability to turn off chat history in its popular chatbot ChatGPT. In a Tuesday blog post, the company said conversations that are started when chat history is disabled will not be used to train and improve its models and will not appear in the history sidebar. The controls are found in the ChatGPT settings and can be changed at any time. The mode rolled out ot all users.