Mira Murati Thinking Machines Unveils a Real-Time AI That Feels Straight Out of “Her”

Remember the dreamy, conversational AI companion from the 2013 film Her, the one voiced by Scarlett Johansson? It looks like that fictional idea is inching closer to reality. Mira Murati Thinking Machines, the startup founded by the former OpenAI CTO, has just pulled back the curtain on a new kind of artificial intelligence that talks, listens, and reacts in real time, almost like a person sitting next to you.

The reveal came through a series of demos shared on Tuesday, and the buzz it has generated suggests the AI race is about to get a whole lot more interesting.

Who Is Mira Murati?

While Sam Altman has become a household name as the face of OpenAI, far fewer people recognise Mira Murati, the woman who quietly powered much of what OpenAI shipped to the world. As chief technology officer, she sat at the heart of products that reshaped how millions interact with AI every day.

Murati, who is of Albanian origin (a fact often confused because of her name), eventually had a serious falling out with OpenAI and Sam Altman. In late 2023, when the OpenAI board attempted to remove Altman from his role, Murati was part of that board. She even briefly held the interim CEO position for a couple of days before Microsoft’s Satya Nadella stepped in and helped Altman return to power.

The fallout from that boardroom drama triggered a wave of departures. Chief scientist Ilya Sutskever walked out in June 2024, and Murati followed a few months later. By February 2025, she had launched her own venture, Thinking Machines.

Why Investors Are Lining Up

Something big is clearly brewing inside Thinking Machines. In barely over a year, the company has pulled in serious capital from heavyweight investors. Reports now suggest the startup is raising fresh funds at a valuation north of 50 billion dollars, which is staggering for a company that has only just begun showing its hand publicly.

Until this week, most people had been guessing what Murati and her team were actually building. The Tuesday demos finally offered some answers, and they were eye-opening.

The Big Reveal: An AI That Behaves Like a Companion

Most AI tools today, including ChatGPT and Claude, operate in a turn-based fashion. You type something, wait for a response, then type again. It works, but it does not feel natural.

Thinking Machines is trying to break that pattern. Their new system is designed to behave more like a friend or coworker than a chatbot. It can:

• Listen and watch through audio and video inputs in real time
• Speak naturally, even interrupting or jumping in when needed
• Read the environment around the user and offer relevant input
• Hold uneven, free-flowing conversations the way humans actually do

In one demo, the AI observed what was happening around the user and chimed in with thoughts based on what it saw. In another, it carried out an asymmetric back-and-forth that genuinely sounded like two people chatting rather than a person querying a machine.

In a blog post, the company put it this way: humans collaborate by messaging, talking, listening, watching, showing, and jumping in when necessary, and AI should be able to do the same. Their goal is to let people work with AI the way they naturally work with other humans, processing audio, video, and text simultaneously while thinking and reacting on the fly.

A Step Toward the AI of “Her”

It is hard not to draw comparisons to Spike Jonze’s film Her, where a man falls for an AI assistant that feels deeply personal and alive. The Thinking Machines demos are not quite at that emotional depth yet, but the direction is unmistakable. The AI is being trained from the ground up for real-time interaction rather than having that capability awkwardly bolted on later.

Announcing the new system, Murati wrote that her team is sharing their work on what they call interaction models, a brand-new class of AI built from scratch to handle live interaction natively instead of being stretched out from a turn-based foundation.

That distinction matters. Most current AI systems are essentially text predictors with voice features layered on top. What Thinking Machines is doing sounds architecturally different, and that could be why investors are so excited.

What This Could Mean for the AI Industry

If Thinking Machines delivers on this vision, it could shift how people think about AI assistants entirely. Imagine a virtual colleague that joins your video call, follows the discussion, and chimes in with helpful points. Or a personal companion that genuinely senses your mood and responds accordingly.

It also raises fresh questions. How do we set boundaries with AI that feels this close to human? What happens to privacy when a system is constantly watching and listening? These are conversations society will need to have sooner rather than later.

For now, what is certain is that Mira Murati Thinking Machines has officially stepped out of stealth mode with something genuinely fresh. The rivalry with OpenAI just took on a new dimension, and the AI landscape is about to feel a lot more crowded, and a lot more interesting.