Thinking Machines Lab sets out its worldview: 'The future worth building is human'
On 10 July 2026, Mira Murati shared the worldview behind the mission of Thinking Machines Lab in an essay titled "The Future Worth Building Is Human".
The core thesis: the mission is to build AI that extends human will and judgment, rather than replacing it. Human values and knowledge don't average out and can't be centralised — the good future has many AIs, raised in different places and shaped by the people they serve.
Against centralisation: most AI today is trained in a handful of places and then frozen, unshaped by the people it serves. Drawing on Hayek and Polanyi, the essay argues that productive knowledge is tacit, local and dispersed — so for AI to benefit from distributed knowledge, it must itself be distributed.
Technical directions: training frontier models with multimodal interaction and customizability; tools (Tinker) that let people fine-tune model weights on their own knowledge; interaction models that widen the human–machine communication channel; and open research.
Decentralised alignment: a single locus of value alignment becomes a locus of power to be captured. The lab envisions alignment as a feature of an ecosystem of AIs — raised in different places, disagreeing, competing and learning from each other — rather than one centrally-aligned model. "We believe in keeping the weirdness alive."
Read more: Thinking Machines Lab · Mira Murati on X
