Mira Murati's Thinking Machines snaps up Workshop Labs

Thinking Machines Lab — the AI startup from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati — has acquired Workshop Labs, a small but technically sharp team focused on personalized AI.

Founded by Rudolf Laine and Luke Drago, Workshop Labs built an integrated private post-training and inference stack, hit best-in-class speeds for trillion-parameter model training, and shipped a product that lets anyone fine-tune a model with their own data in a few clicks. Their research roots trace back to The Intelligence Curse — an essay series asking what happens to human agency when AI takes over economic output.

The two teams had already been collaborating; Thinking Machines gave Workshop Labs early access to Tinker, their personalization product. The acquisition formalizes what was already a shared thesis: AI should augment people, not erase them.

Why it matters: Murati is quietly assembling a team that cares deeply about human-centric AI — this hire-by-acquisition signals personalization is core to Thinking Machines' product roadmap, not an afterthought.