Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI who now runs her own AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab, broke a roughly 18-month media silence this week with a carefully measured sit-down with Bloomberg in San Francisco. Murati, who spent six years at OpenAI before departing, has kept a low profile since founding Thinking Machines, which has spent the past 18 months raising capital, hiring researchers, and quietly shipping a single product: Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-source AI models. The timing of the appearance is notable given how much the competitive landscape has shifted — OpenAI continues to dominate headlines, Anthropic's momentum has become the talk of the industry, and Elon Musk's xAI was recently folded into SpaceX ahead of what is expected to be a massive IPO. In that environment, staying invisible carries diminishing returns, and Murati seemed to use the interview to make just enough noise to remind the market she exists. The centerpiece of the conversation was a preview of what Thinking Machines is calling "interaction models," which Murati described as a fundamentally different kind of AI interface than what currently exists. Rather than the turn-based, prompt-and-response dynamic that defines most AI products today, the company's models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals. The goal, Murati told Bloomberg's Emily Chang, is for the system to pick up on the texture of human communication — the interruptions, mid-thought corrections, and pauses — in something closer to real time. True to form, though, Murati framed the work as a first step rather than a finished product and declined to commit to a specific release date. She also revisited the episode that first thrust her into the public spotlight: the chaotic November 2023 week when OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman and she briefly became interim CEO, an event internally known as "the blip." Murati said she felt clear about each decision she made during that period and described protecting the mission and the team as the consistent through-line. The interview marked one of her most direct public reflections on the episode to date, though it stopped short of new revelations about the board's reasoning or her relationship with Altman.