# Mira Murati, Ilya Sutskever and who runs each AI company now

> What Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever do now, and who runs 19 other AI companies, each name checked on the company's own pages.

By Pat Simmons · November 14, 2026 · 13 min read

Canonical: https://www.aiformortals.co/blog/ai-company-founders-and-ceos

Mira Murati is the founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, an AI research and product company that came out of stealth on February 18, 2025. Before that she was OpenAI's chief technology officer, and she posted the note telling OpenAI staff she was leaving on September 25, 2024. Her lab sells Tinker, a paid service for training AI models on your own data, and it makes its own family of models called Inkling.

Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and its former chief scientist, has formally been CEO of Safe Superintelligence (SSI) since July 3, 2025, with Daniel Levy as president. Francis deSouza now runs Scale AI, Character.AI's CEO is leaving for Disney, and Simon Edwards runs Groq now that its founder has joined Nvidia. The table further down covers 16 more AI companies.

Last checked November 14, 2026: every other CEO and founder named here was read off a page the company controls, opened on that date. Thinking Machines Lab's site doesn't list titles, so Murati's comes from TechCrunch's launch report and her own X profile. Career history comes from the reports linked in the text, and companies we couldn't confirm on an official page were left out.

## What does Mira Murati do now?

Mira Murati runs Thinking Machines Lab as its CEO. When the lab launched, TechCrunch reported that OpenAI co-founder John Schulman joined as chief scientist and Barret Zoph, who led model post-training at OpenAI, as chief technology officer. Her profile on X now reads "Now building @thinkymachines. Previously CTO @OpenAI."

Before Thinking Machines she spent six and a half years at OpenAI, where she rose to chief technology officer and for a short time served as interim CEO. Both jobs are covered in the next section.

The lab describes itself on its homepage as "an artificial intelligence research and product company" that wants to make AI systems "more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable." It says its people built products including ChatGPT and Character.ai, open-weights models like Mistral, and open-source projects such as PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq and Segment Anything.

So far the company has shipped two kinds of things: Tinker, a paid tool that lets developers and researchers train AI models on their own data, and the Inkling models, which it trains itself. Both have their own section below, and the Thinking Machines Lab company page tracks what it ships next.

## Why did Mira Murati leave OpenAI?

In her own words, she left "to create the time and space to do my own exploration." She wrote that in the note she shared with the OpenAI team, which she posted on X on September 25, 2024. The note says that for now her focus was "doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition." Five months later she launched Thinking Machines Lab.

_The note Murati shared with the OpenAI team when she left, attached to her X post of September 25, 2024._

Her path to that job ran through cars and motion sensors. According to TechCrunch, she spent three years at Tesla as a senior product manager on the Model X, then was VP of product and engineering at Leap Motion, a startup that made hand- and finger-tracking sensors for computers.

She joined OpenAI in 2018 as VP of applied AI and partnerships and became chief technology officer in 2022. As CTO she led the company's work on ChatGPT, the image generator DALL-E and Codex, the code-writing system that powered early versions of GitHub Copilot.

She also ran OpenAI for a short time. When OpenAI's board announced that Sam Altman would leave as CEO, its announcement named Murati interim CEO, "effective immediately," and said she already led "the company's research, product, and safety functions."

## Thinking Machines Lab: what Tinker and the Inkling models are, and what they cost

Tinker is Thinking Machines Lab's paid product: a service for fine-tuning AI models, which means taking an existing model and training it further on your own examples so it gets better at one job. It launched on October 1, 2025 as a private beta for researchers and developers. You write the training code, and Thinking Machines runs it on its own computers, so you don't manage any hardware.

The Tinker page lists what customers have built with it. Bridgewater, the investment firm, trained a model to pick out what its investors care about, such as relevant financial news, and Glean trained Waldo, a model that searches a company's own documents to answer questions.

Tinker is paid by use. Tinker's pricing page charges per million tokens (a token is a small chunk of text, often part of a word) for training and for generating text, with rates that vary by model and by how much text the model reads at once. Saved training checkpoints cost $0.10 per GB per month. For the newest model, Inkling 2 Small, the page lists $1.00 per million tokens generated and $1.50 per million tokens trained at the 64K length, in prices dated October 19, 2026. The same page lists a second option, still in beta, where you pay per token to use the three Inkling models directly without training them.

The Inkling models are the lab's own. The first, Inkling, came out on July 15, 2026 as an open-weights model, which means anyone can download it and run it themselves, and it reasons over text, images and audio. The lab says it has 975 billion parameters (the values a model learns in training), with 41 billion of them active at a time, and that it can read up to 1 million tokens at once. The announcement says "Inkling is not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed," and pitches it as a starting point for customizing on Tinker.

A smaller version, Inkling-Small, followed on July 30, 2026, with 276 billion parameters. The lab says it performs comparably to Inkling at a quarter of the size.

The newest is Inkling 2 Small, released November 5, 2026 as the lab's second model generation. It has 594 billion parameters, 17 billion of them active, and takes images as well as text. The lab says it scored 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a ranking that combines several tests, well above its earlier models. It launched on Tinker first, and on November 12 the lab added a note to the announcement saying the weights are now available to download on Hugging Face.

_A frame from the city simulator video on the Inkling 2 Small announcement page. Thinking Machines says the model built it with no pre-made assets._

## What is Ilya Sutskever doing now?

Ilya Sutskever is the CEO of Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a lab whose only stated product is a safe superintelligence, meaning an AI smarter than people that stays safe. He took the title in a message SSI posted on its updates page on July 3, 2025: "I am now formally CEO of SSI, and Daniel Levy is President." The same message said co-founder Daniel Gross was no longer part of SSI as of June 29, 2025.

SSI's homepage calls it "the world's first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product," and says it is "an American company with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv." The updates page lists a $1 billion raise from NFDG, a16z, Sequoia, DST Global and SV Angel on September 4, 2024, and a partnership with NVIDIA, posted July 26, 2026, that SSI says will let it scale its computing power by 10 times.

_The whole SSI website is one page of text. Screenshot of ssi.inc, taken November 11, 2026._

Before SSI, Sutskever spent almost a decade at OpenAI. He was its research director when it was founded in 2015 and later its chief scientist, and as chief scientist he sat on the board that announced Sam Altman's exit as CEO. On May 14, 2024 he said on X that he was leaving OpenAI for "a project that is very personally meaningful to me."

## Who were the cofounders of OpenAI?

OpenAI's founding team, listed in its "Introducing OpenAI" post of December 11, 2015, had Sam Altman and Elon Musk as co-chairs, Ilya Sutskever as research director and Greg Brockman, formerly Stripe's CTO, as CTO. The post names seven other founding members:

- Trevor Blackwell

- Vicki Cheung

- Andrej Karpathy

- Durk Kingma

- John Schulman

- Pamela Vagata

- Wojciech Zaremba

The post also lists Pieter Abbeel, Yoshua Bengio, Alan Kay, Sergey Levine and Vishal Sikka as advisors. It says Altman, Brockman, Musk, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, Infosys and YC Research together committed $1 billion. Mira Murati was not a co-founder; she joined in 2018.

Two of the founding names now lead or work at the labs on this page: Sutskever runs SSI, and Schulman joined Thinking Machines Lab as chief scientist at its launch. For what OpenAI makes today, see what OpenAI is and what it makes, and for who holds the shares, who owns OpenAI, Anthropic and the other AI labs.

## Who is Scale AI's CEO, and who founded Hugging Face and Character.AI?

Francis deSouza is Scale AI's CEO. Hugging Face was founded by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, and its own blog lists Delangue as CEO. Character.AI's CEO, Karandeep Anand, is leaving to join Disney.

Scale AI

Scale's about page names Francis deSouza as CEO and features the Axios story on his hiring. Axios reported on July 30, 2026 that Scale had hired deSouza, then Google Cloud's chief operating officer, replacing interim chief executive Jason Droege.

Scale's founder is Alexandr Wang. On June 12, 2025, Scale announced a new investment from Meta that valued it at over $29 billion, and said Wang was joining Meta to work on Meta's AI efforts while staying on Scale's board. The same announcement made Droege, then chief strategy officer, interim CEO; he had joined Scale in September 2024 and was earlier a founder of Uber Eats.

Hugging Face

Hugging Face's own blog, in an April 2025 post about buying the robot maker Pollen Robotics, describes the company as "Founded by Clément Delangue (CEO), Julien Chaumond (CTO), and Thomas Wolf (CSO)". Hugging Face is the website where AI developers share models and datasets, and Hugging Face explained covers what it offers.

Character.AI

Character.AI named Karandeep Anand CEO on June 20, 2025, after he had spent nine months as a board advisor. He was previously president of Brex, before that a vice president at Meta, and he held executive roles at Microsoft. On September 18, 2026, Character.AI announced that Anand is joining Disney as Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, and that he expects members of Character's technical team to join him. None of the Character.AI posts checked for this page name a new CEO.

The company is also being sold. Character.AI started a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy process in October 2026 to run a court-supervised sale, and said the platform will be wound down if no workable bid comes in. A court notice it posted after a November 4, 2026 order names Disney as the "stalking horse" for certain assets, meaning the first bidder whose offer sets the floor, with bids due November 24 and an auction on December 1, 2026. Character.AI says paid subscriptions remain active, and the app is still running. What Character.AI makes covers the product side.

## Who runs the AI tools you use? CEO table

These are the chief executives of 16 more companies behind AI apps, chips and models, each confirmed on a page the company controls on November 14, 2026. The Source column links that page. "Not named on page" means the page we used names no other co-founders, which doesn't mean there aren't any.

CompanyWhat it makesCEOOther co-founders namedSource

ReplitSoftware you build by describing itAmjad Masad (co-founder)Haya Odehreplit.com/about
LovableAI tool that turns descriptions into appsAnton Osika (co-founder)Not named in fullLovable video page
CognitionDevin, an AI that writes and migrates codeScott Wu (co-founder)Not named on pageDevin blog
CerebrasWafer-scale AI chips and fast AI hostingAndrew Feldman (co-founder)Jean-Philippe Fricker, Michael James, Gary Lauterbach, Sean Liecerebras.ai/company
GroqGroqCloud, a service for running AI modelsSimon Edwards (since Dec 24, 2025)Founder Jonathan Ross joined NvidiaGroq newsroom
CohereAI for businessesAidan Gomez (co-founder)Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhangcohere.com/about
HarveyAI for lawyersWinston Weinberg (co-founder)Not named on pageHarvey author page
ElevenLabsAI voices and voice agentsMati Staniszewski (co-founder)Not named on pageElevenLabs blog
SunoAI musicMikey Shulman (co-founder)Not named on pageSuno blog
HeyGenAI-generated videoJoshua Xu (co-founder)Not named on pageHeyGen author page
SynthesiaAI video platform for businessVictor Riparbelli (co-founder)Steffen Tjerrild, Matt Niessner, Lourdes Agapitosynthesia.io/about
RunwayAI tools for creative work, and world modelsCristóbal Valenzuela (co-founder, co-CEO)Not named on pageRunway news
Luma AIAI video and image modelsAmit Jain (co-founder)Alex Yu (CTO)lumalabs.ai/about
Black Forest LabsVisual AI models for images and videoRobin Rombach (co-founder)Not named on pageBFL blog
HiggsfieldVideo, image and audio models in one workspaceAlex Mashrabov (co-founder)Not named on pageHiggsfield blog
World LabsMarble, which makes 3D worldsNo CEO named; joining AMDFei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Ben Mildenhall, Christoph Lassnerworldlabs.ai/about

Two companies in the table have changed hands or are about to. Groq licensed its technology to Nvidia on December 24, 2025; founder Jonathan Ross and president Sunny Madra moved to Nvidia, Simon Edwards became CEO, and Groq says it stays independent with GroqCloud running without interruption. World Labs has signed an agreement to join AMD, expected to close by the end of 2026. Fei-Fei Li will become AMD's Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, and Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will keep leading the World Labs team. At Runway, Valenzuela's title is co-CEO, and Runway's announcement doesn't name the other co-CEO.

For the coding companies in the table, who owns Replit, Lovable, Cursor and Devin covers their owners and valuations. The AI companies directory has a page for each company we track.

How these names were checked: every name other than Murati's was read off a page the company controls on November 14, 2026, either an about or leadership page, a press release, or a blog post that credits the person with their title. News reports were used only where the company points to them (Scale's about page features the Axios story on its CEO) or for career history the companies don't publish (TechCrunch on Murati's jobs before OpenAI). Thinking Machines Lab's site doesn't list titles, so Murati's comes from TechCrunch's launch report and her own X profile. Companies whose own pages didn't confirm a current CEO were left out. That includes Together AI, whose July 2026 funding post lists a co-founder as its author but gives no titles, and Stability AI, whose news page names a CEO only in posts from early 2025. Treat each row as true on the date above and check the linked page for anything newer.

## Questions people ask about AI founders and CEOs

Who is the CEO of Thinking Machines Lab?
Mira Murati, who founded it after leaving her job as OpenAI's chief technology officer. John Schulman, one of OpenAI's original founding members, joined as chief scientist when the lab launched in February 2025.

Who is the CEO of Safe Superintelligence?
Ilya Sutskever. He formally became CEO in July 2025, after co-founder Daniel Gross left, and Daniel Levy became president at the same time.

Who founded Scale AI, and who runs it now?
Alexandr Wang founded Scale AI. He left to work on Meta's AI efforts in June 2025 when Meta invested in the company, and he stayed on Scale's board. Jason Droege ran Scale as interim CEO until Francis deSouza took over in July 2026.

Who are Hugging Face's founders, and who is its CEO?
Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf founded Hugging Face. Hugging Face's April 2025 post on its Pollen Robotics purchase lists Delangue as CEO, Chaumond as CTO and Wolf as CSO, and none of the Hugging Face pages checked for this article name anyone else in those jobs.

Who is the CEO of Groq?
Simon Edwards. He took over on December 24, 2025, when Groq licensed its technology to Nvidia and founder Jonathan Ross moved to Nvidia.

Who founded Lovable?
Anton Osika is Lovable's co-founder and CEO. The Lovable pages checked for this article don't give the other co-founders' full names, so the table leaves them out.

Who is the CEO of Harvey?
Winston Weinberg, who co-founded Harvey in 2022. Harvey's author page says that before founding it he was an associate at the law firm O'Melveny & Myers, working on securities and antitrust cases.

Who is the CEO of Luma AI?
Amit Jain, who co-founded Luma in 2021 with Alex Yu, now its CTO. Luma's about page says Jain previously worked on product design for Apple Vision Pro and on Apple's computer vision team.

Who is the CEO of Cerebras?
Andrew Feldman, one of the five people who started Cerebras in 2015 to bring wafer-scale computing (chips the size of a whole silicon wafer) to market. The other four co-founders are listed in the table.

Is Character.AI shutting down?
No shutdown has been announced. The app is still running while the company is sold through Chapter 11, and Character.AI has said it will wind the platform down only if the sale produces no workable bid. Disney is the stalking-horse bidder for certain assets, and the auction is set for December 1, 2026.

Who runs World Labs?
The World Labs pages checked here don't name a CEO. The company was founded by Fei-Fei Li with Justin Johnson, Ben Mildenhall and Christoph Lassner. It has agreed to join AMD, where Li will become an executive vice president and chief scientist, and Johnson and Mildenhall will keep leading the World Labs team.

## Sources

- Thinking Machines: Announcing Tinker (October 1, 2025)

- Character.AI: Chapter 11 update and transaction notice (November 2026)

- Together AI: Announcing our $800M Series C (July 1, 2026)

- Stability AI news page