She should be the future of AI at Apple – and her company, Apple’s next acquisition

Apple has a major artificial intelligence opportunity before it that the company could potentially address in one multibillion-dollar transaction. If this startup founder is able to productize AI, finally fix Siri, and unlock a wealth of new revenue streams for Apple, I would argue that she might also be a future Apple CEO candidate someday.

Apple’s position in the AI race is rather undefined. The company’s hybrid strategy includes serving as a platform where frontier AI products operate while developing its own AI consumer features within the Apple Intelligence suite.

Apple may charge rent to AI providers who want to live on the iPhone, but Apple’s current strategy does not include developing AI technology as a service that it can sell to the enterprise, education, or directly to consumers.

Apple is best when the company sticks to what it’s good at, but there’s no reason a company as integral to computing as Apple couldn’t be good at serving AI solutions that appeal to privacy-minded clients in business and education.

OpenAI, the AI firm behind ChatGPT, isn’t for sale. However, a consequence of OpenAI’s early leadership being dysfunctional is that you don’t need to buy the company to buy top OpenAI talent.

An OpenAI founder of unarguable consequence and the subject of this piece, of course, is Mira Murati. Her AI startup Thinking Machines Lab is home to dozens of experts from leading AI firms. Thinking Machines Lab also says it will focus on building “multimodal AI models and products that are accessible with practical applications.”

Quoting from my Neural column on February 27, 2025:

While OpenAI continues to forge ahead, former key players at OpenAI that left the company have founded new startups that are raising money and building new AI tools.

Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, recently announced her AI startup called Thinking Machines Lab. Murati has brought along more than 30 experts from OpenAI, Meta, and Google DeepMind.

Co-founder Lilian Weng previously served as Vice President of AI safety and robotics as well as applied research at OpenAI. John Schulman, another OpenAI co-founder, joined Thinking Machines from Anthropic where he served as a researcher.

Thinking Machines Lab is focused on multimodal AI models and products that are accessible with practical applications.

Here’s how Thinking Machines Lab describes its focus in part:

While AI capabilities have advanced dramatically, key gaps remain. The scientific community’s understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities. Knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and people’s abilities to use AI effectively. And, despite their potential, these systems remain difficult for people to customize to their specific needs and values. To bridge the gaps, we’re building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable. […]

Emphasis on human-AI collaboration. Instead of focusing solely on making fully autonomous AI systems, we are excited to build multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively.

More flexible, adaptable, and personalized AI systems. We see enormous potential for AI to help in every field of work. While current systems excel at programming and mathematics, we’re building AI that can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum of applications.

The company is seeking to raise $1 billion at a $9 billion valuation, according to Business Insider.

The actual cost to acquire Thinking Machines Lab and retain its talent could be north of $20 billion for Apple.

What would Apple get for what would be its largest acquisition ever?

• Mira Murati and Thinking Machines Lab would provide Apple with unique AI research and top-tier experts in modern AI — not just machine learning experts.
• Murati and company would be off the table for Google, Meta, Samsung, and other potential suitors.
• If AI proves core to the future of computing, Murati could potentially lead Apple and shape the company into an AI-first firm.

AI may be an existential threat to Apple. While Apple provides an OS on which AI can run today, AI has the potential to itself become the operating system. A standard graphical user interface could be as primitive as the command line compared to a computing experience built on a foundation of AI.

There’s somewhat of a preview of this with Apple Intelligence, Siri, and ChatGPT. ChatGPT works through Siri with Apple Intelligence, but the better experience is far and away through the ChatGPT app – no Siri or Apple Intelligence required. Perhaps the best AI will run on the iPhone, but the best experience could be using that AI firm’s product ecosystem.

Nothing about Android has made me consider abandoning the iPhone since finally getting my hands on the white iPhone 4 in spring 2011. However, a product ecosystem (phone, watch, earbuds) designed around modern AI would make the iPhone seem dated in comparison. Fortunately for Apple, this best-in-class AI platform doesn’t exist yet, but it’s Apple’s game to lose.

Back to Mira Murati (36). Is there someone at Apple with her level of modern AI experience? Not the machine learning stuff that Apple hired John Giannandrea from Google to tackle when the narrative was that Apple was getting beat in ML. I mean someone who has been at the frontlines of AI as generative AI and large language models. Is there a team of former top leaders from OpenAI and Anthropic at Apple that mirrors the team she has assembled with Thinking Machines Lab?

Many are eager to see what Apple’s latest reorganization will do for Siri. Mike Rockwell is highly regarded for his experience solving hard problems, including getting Apple Vision Pro and visionOS out of the research lab and into customers’ hands. Don’t blame him for the $3,500 starting price. His team at least shipped a product that by all accounts works as advertised.

Siri has never really worked as advertised, literally, and so Rockwell is tasked with getting those advertised features to actually work.

The problem is that Apple didn’t pitch Apple Intelligence as the solution to finally fixing an unreliable Siri, although it may have felt like that at the time. Instead, Apple promised to make Siri even more capable with on-screen awareness, taking actions between apps, and answering requests based on personal data in Messages, Mail, and so on.

Rockwell has been called a Siri critic, so perhaps his leadership will indeed focus on strengthening Siri’s core muscles by making it more reliable and less error-prone. By all means, let Rockwell do what he’s best at and ship a version of Siri with a strong foundation.

What I don’t think is fair is to expect Rockwell to make AI itself better. That’s where I believe plugging in Mira Murati and team gives Apple the boost it needs to stay relevant — you know, skate to where the puck is going.

Apple just isn’t playing in the same space as Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are right now with AI. It definitely isn’t in the same league as OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and Perplexity.

That would be fine if Apple’s position was to be completely AI agnostic and embrace third-party AI providers with open arms. Instead, Apple has limited integration with ChatGPT that fell under Murati’s domain at OpenAI, and it has publicly invited Google to integrate Gemini with Siri.

Google hasn’t donated Gemini to Siri, though, and why would it? Even the ChatGPT integration appears to help Apple more than OpenAI right now, which is not how that partnership should work. Apple is reportedly working on its own chatbot version of Siri, slated for release sometime between the year after next and the century after next. Being a system-level Siri replacement would be prime real estate for the Claudes and Geminis of the world. Being Siri’s “phone a friend” resource while Apple takes its time to catch up isn’t as attractive a proposition.

So what is Apple to do about all of this? Siri was a startup. Apple Music was a startup. iTunes was a startup. OS X was, you may have heard, a startup. Face ID was a startup. Touch ID was a startup. Apple silicon was a startup. Apple’s new C1 cellular modem was a ton of years and a startup. Pixelmator, Shazam, Dark Sky, Beddit? Startups.

Apple has a few AI startups on its books, but none particularly significant. Thinking Machines Lab isn’t yet an AI startup of great impact, either, but its people are. Perhaps Apple should once again buy a startup that serves as the foundation for its next great endeavor into the future.

Let Rockwell make all the repairs and changes needed to allow Siri to meet the baseline performance that Apple should expect. Tap Murati to focus not on the baggage but instead on the future. Let her turn Apple into a leader in AI that doesn’t just rely on AI companies but has companies rely on its AI. Give Murati’s team a shot at building a competing product. Start the competition now. See who ends up with the iPhone as we know it and who ends up with the iPod-based iPhone that never left the lab.

Hell, if Murati is needed to make Siri work too, then I’m all for changing Siri’s name to Mira. TL;DR wake me up when Apple buys Thinking Machines Lab and hires Mira Murati.

I’m hoping we’re in the Planet of the Apps era of Apple Intelligence, and the Severance era of AI at Apple is still to come.