Mira Murati, the Quiet Superpower in the AI Race

The first episode of AI Icons, a new format on In the Blink of AI: in under 30 minutes, Georgie Healy tells the whole story of one of the people reshaping tech — the good, the bad and the ugly, but only the facts, no spin — and closes with her take on what actually made them an icon, and whether it is something the rest of us could replicate.

First up is Mira Murati. Georgie traces her path from a childhood in isolated post-communist Albania — where maths was the one subject the party could not rewrite — through a scholarship in Canada, degrees in maths and mechanical engineering, and a Goldman Sachs floor in Tokyo at 21. Then Tesla and those ridiculous Falcon Wing doors, a risky bet on a startup called Leap Motion, and the move that made her famous: OpenAI, where she rose to CTO and helped bring DALL-E and ChatGPT into the world.

And then the part that reads like a thriller: the 72 hours in November 2023 when Sam Altman was fired, Mira was named CEO, and a 52-page memo and a string of 2:30am texts sat right at the centre of it. Georgie walks through what we know, what we still do not, and what came out under oath — before finishing on Mira's next act, Thinking Machines Lab, the record-breaking raise, the talent exodus, and which of her "four Gs" explains her best.