A technician works at an Amazon Web Services AI datacenter in New Carlisle, Indiana, on 2 October 2025. A technician works at an Amazon Web Services AI datacenter in New Carlisle, Indiana, on 2 October 2025. At Davos, tech CEOs laid out their vision for AI's world domination Tech chiefs waxed poetic about AI to delegates at Davos. Plus, the'human' drama of AI startups and why Tesla is thriving in Texas This week's edition is a team effort: my colleague Heather Stewart reports on the plans for AI's world domination at Davos; I examine how huge investments have followed AI companies with little to their names but drama and dreams; and Nick Robins-Early spotlights how lax regulation of autonomous driving in Texas allowed Tesla to thrive. When they weren't discussing Donald Trump, delegates at the World Economic Forum last week were being dazzled by the prospects for artificial intelligence.

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.

The news is a blow for Thinking Machines Lab. Two narratives are already emerging about what happened. Thinking Machines cofounders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz are leaving the fledgling AI lab and rejoining OpenAI, the ChatGPT-maker announced on Thursday. OpenAI's CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, shared the news in a memo to staff Thursday afternoon. The news was first reported on X by technology reporter Kylie Robison, who wrote that Zoph was fired for "unethical conduct."

Mark Zuckerberg is on a warpath to recruit top talent in the AI field for his newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs. After trying to gut OpenAI (and successfully poaching several top researchers), he appears to have set his sights on his next target. More than a dozen people at Mira Murati's 50-person startup, Thinking Machines Lab, have been approached or received offers from the tech giant. One of those offers was more than 1 billion over a multi-year span, a source with knowledge of the negotiations tells WIRED. The rest were between 200 million and 500 million over a four-year span, multiple sources confirm.

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.

In the summer of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, was meeting with a group of new researchers at the company. By all traditional metrics, Sutskever should have felt invincible: He was the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT, then the fastest-growing app in history; his company's valuation had skyrocketed; and OpenAI was the unrivaled leader of the industry believed to power the future of Silicon Valley. But the chief scientist seemed to be at war with himself. Sutskever had long believed that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, was inevitable--now, as things accelerated in the generative-AI industry, he believed AGI's arrival was imminent, according to Geoff Hinton, an AI pioneer who was his Ph.D. adviser and mentor, and another person familiar with Sutskever's thinking. To people around him, Sutskever seemed consumed by thoughts of this impending civilizational transformation. What would the world look like when a supreme AGI emerged and surpassed humanity? And what responsibility did OpenAI have to ensure an end state of extraordinary prosperity, not extraordinary suffering?

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.

Former OpenAI executive Mira Murati says it could take decades, but AI systems eventually will perform a wide range of cognitive tasks as well as humans do--a prospective technological milestone widely known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. "Right now, it feels quite achievable," Murati said at WIRED's The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Tuesday. In her first interview since resigning as OpenAI's chief technology officer in September, Murati told WIRED's Steven Levy that she's not overly concerned about recent chatter in the AI industry that developing more powerful generative AI models is proving challenging. "Current evidence shows that progress will likely continue," Murati said. Whether we need new ideas to get to AGI-level systems, that's uncertain.

OpenAI, the developer of the groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot, is preparing to overhaul its corporate structure and become a for-profit business. The startup's chief executive, Sam Altman, acknowledged on Thursday that it was "not a normal company" after another surprising development at OpenAI this week when its its chief technology officer, Mira Murati, resigned. Her departure was quickly followed by the announcement that two other executives had quit. The company is synonymous with an artificial intelligence boom triggered by the emergence, in 2022, of OpenAI's signature product, a chatbot that stunned users with its ability to craft convincing, human-like responses to an array of prompts. Altman, in turn, has become the poster child for a technology that is advancing rapidly and is being developed by the world's largest tech companies, including Microsoft – OpenAI's biggest backer – Google, the Facebook owner Meta and Amazon.

There's a story about Sam Altman that has been repeated often enough to become Silicon Valley lore. In 2012, Paul Graham, a co-founder of the famed start-up accelerator Y Combinator and one of Altman's biggest mentors, sat Altman down and asked if he wanted to take over the organization. The decision was a peculiar one: Altman was only in his late 20s, and at least on paper, his qualifications were middling. He had dropped out of Stanford to found a company that ultimately hadn't panned out. After seven years, he'd sold it for roughly the same amount that his investors had put in.