Steven Rosenbaum’s new book, The Future of Truth, endeavored to explore the ways in which A.I. will affect our understanding of truth. According to a New York Times investigation, however, the book contains more than half a dozen A.I.-generated, fabricated quotes.

And now for the main event…

When former OpenAI C.T.O. Mira Murati launched Thinking Machines Lab, in February 2025, she made a helluva splash in Silicon Valley. Not only had Murati left OpenAI to set up the foundations of a seemingly legit competitor, but she’d become a talent magnet in the midst of a highly competitive battle for engineers. More importantly, she quickly raised $2 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Jane Street, Google Ventures, and Nvidia, that valued the company at $12 billion.

At launch, Thinking Machines Lab had no product in sight—just a dream of a slightly more focused and quixotic version of OpenAI that would advance “human-A.I. collaboration.” It wasn’t all that dissimilar to what, say, the Amodeis had set out to do when they bailed on Sam Altman’s hyperscale-at-all-costs vision to create a truly viable competitor in Anthropic. Or even what Ilya Sutskever, another former OpenAI co-founder and executive, had less successfully attempted when he launched Safe Superintelligence—a startup that has secured billions in funding, also without any real product to show for it. Anyway, some 15 months later, and during a moment of head-spinning acceleration in the space, OpenAI is about to go public, Anthropic is raising another privately financed round at about a $1 trillion valuation, and Thinking Machines has been eerily quiet.

Last October, Thinking Machines launched Tinker, an A.P.I. designed to help researchers fine-tune open L.L.M.s. Cool, sure—but this “me too” product, as one source close to the company suggested, was hardly what the industry had expected from the lab. Instead, it seemed designed merely to “remind people,” as this person put it, that the company still existed. Afterward, Thinking Machines fully dropped off the radar. (The company declined an interview request for this article.)

Thinking Machines now employs around 150 people, but 13 of its 42 founding team members have already left the building, including three of its six original co-founders, according to Business Insider. Several returned to OpenAI; others jumped at those ludicrous offers coming from Meta. Not surprisingly, the industry chatter has been pretty brutal. Yet last week, at the tail end of this mini-exodus, Thinking Machines unveiled a new product, one slightly more in line with what you might expect from a frontier A.I. lab: an A.I. system that Murati is calling Interaction Models.

The general idea is to make conversations with models feel more… human. As Murati explained on X, the “current ‘A.I. experience’ often feels like a conversation that only begins after we stop talking. We have to batch our thoughts. We can’t point at things. We phrase questions like emails. The interface doesn’t leave room for us so we adapt to the models.” Essentially, Thinking Machines wrote in a blog post, they’ve been trying to build more natural interactivity directly into the model, rather than in the form of scaffolding that goes on top. In practice, this would enable users to interrupt the model, point things out, and adjust their queries in real time. Thinking Machines also announced that it would award multiple $100,000 grants for related social research.

Oumi founder Manos Koukoumidis, who formerly led engineering teams at Microsoft, Meta, and Google, told me the research direction is certainly “worth exploring”—he just wasn’t sure why Thinking Machines decided to be the company to explore it. “This makes one wonder, is there a specific strategic direction they have in mind that is not clear to the rest of us?” he said. “Are they struggling to figure out what is the right direction for them? Or is it just full of researchers and different voices that they’re just, as a company, a little bit scattered?”

Investors are presumably asking the same questions. Several sources I spoke to found Thinking Machines’ research preview underwhelming—useful, but incongruous with the hype that the company has generated or the capital it has raised. Others were simply puzzled by what it has been trying to accomplish. Said one person familiar with the company, “A lot of people are confused on if they have a plan. They seem to have started with a massive inventory of brilliant people, and they haven’t been very disclosing.”

Perhaps, this person posited, Thinking Machines might just be one of those labs, like Yann LeCun’s Advanced Machine Intelligence, or Sutskever’s SSI, where there’s simply no product story… ever. But it’s hard to imagine that mere research is what Andreessen Horowitz had in mind when the firm led the company’s 10-figure seed round. “If this is anything more than 25 percent of their research portfolio, they’re going to be falling way below people’s expectations of this organization,” this person added. “People expected quite a lot more innovation from that, and in this field, you just don’t get to do three years of secret shit without getting out in the world.”

But perhaps Murati is pursuing a path that runs deeper than the traditional, now-ubiquitous hype cycle. Venture investor Vanessa Larco, a former partner at NEA, told me that she can see the economic potential for interaction models that vastly improve voice A.I. systems. Already, A.I. is cropping up in daily consumer experiences—Siri, Alexa, retail checkout, customer service calls—and the tech is not particularly good. Jeff Smith, an A.I. engineer and investor, described Thinking Machines’ work on this more natural, conversational interface as “good science—about as good as anyone’s done in this respect.”

Breaking through these uncanny valleys is among the final barriers to wider adoption of digital (or even robotic) assistants. “If we want personal assistants in our ears, they need to be non-irritating to talk to,” Smith told me. “We have all the pieces. What we don’t have yet are the product experiences that are compelling enough that people would choose them.”

But as Larco pointed out, there’s a difference between a cool demo and a new technology finding a real market, especially in this capital-intensive industrial thunderdome. To wit, Thinking Machines’ demo was not all that dissimilar from OpenAI’s own voice-mode product—which it first debuted way back in 2024. (Remember the Scarlett Johansson scandal?) That’s not all that surprising, since the OpenAI engineer who demoed that original product, Rowan Zellers, followed Murati to Thinking Machines.

In the end, two things are true. The formation of a new generation of A.I. behemoths is about talented engineers, of course, but it also requires the maniacal focus of experienced operators to create an actual company. If the hyperscalers ever started to view Thinking Machines as a real threat, it’s hard to imagine that OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic couldn’t ship something similar before Murati’s model had a chance to catch on. “That is Silicon Valley in a freaking nutshell,” Larco said. “The disruptors want to take on the incumbents. The incumbents try to defend their territory, and sometimes they win, and sometimes they lose, and it’s just happening faster with A.I.”

On the other hand, these companies aren’t competing against one another so much as they are against one common foe: time. Indeed, Murati doesn’t need to beat her larger rivals to succeed. As PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes recently told me, most V.C.s are perfectly happy to see a portfolio company bought for parts—a paradigm in which smaller A.I. companies, especially those headed up by big names, are essentially moved along a conveyer belt toward eventual acqui-hire or “buy and kill” exits. He called this new trend “day-trading with V.C.”—or simply side-door investments into the largest and most successful young A.I. companies. If Murati is eventually reabsorbed into OpenAI for more money than her investors put in, that’s a win for everyone.

That’s all for today. I’ll see you next week.

Ian

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