News

Mira Murati steps back into the spotlight, carefully

Published

1 month ago

June 5, 2026

Preport

Mira Murati isn’t a natural creature of the conference stage. As the CTO of OpenAI, she was present but rarely the public face of the company. As CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, she has been even harder to find. So when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday — her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months — it was worth paying attention, even if she was careful not to say too much.

The timing makes sense. Thinking Machines has spent the better part of a year and a half operating largely in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers, and shipping one product, Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-source AI models.

In the meantime, the companies competing for the same talent, customers, and headlines have only grown more omnipresent. OpenAI, where Murati spent six years as CTO, is constantly in the news cycle. Anthropic’s momentum is all that anyone can talk about right now. And xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture, has been folded into SpaceX ahead of what is expected to be its massive public offering, generating its own gravitational pull on attention and investment. In that environment, staying heads down has diminishing returns; at some point, you have to make some noise just to remind the market you exist.

Murati used the Bloomberg appearance to do exactly that and not much more. She previewed what Thinking Machines is calling “interaction models,” which she described as a fundamentally different kind of AI interface. Rather than the turn-based, prompt-and-response dynamic that defines most AI products today, she told interviewer Emily Chang, the company’s models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals. The idea is that they can pick up on the texture of human communication — the interruptions, the mid-thought corrections, even pauses to think — in something closer to real time. But Murati was careful to frame it as a first step, not a finished product, and she declined to put a specific release date on anything.

She also answered questions about the episode that first put her more squarely in the public eye: the chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO. Inside OpenAI it came to be called “the blip.” Murati said she felt clear about her decisions in each moment — that protecting the mission and the team was the through-line that made the choices feel obvious even as the situation appeared to be falling apart from the outside. She said the company would have “imploded” if not for her involvement through that strange five-day stretch and its immediate aftermath. But she acknowledged that clarity of intent is not the same thing as clarity about consequences. In retrospect, she said, she would have pushed harder for more information, a better transition plan, and more transparency. What she did not say, at least not directly, is whether she thinks things turned out well.

Asked whether she still trusts her former boss, she sidestepped the question, steering the conversation toward a larger concern that she returned to several times: the concentration of consequential decisions in too few hands — not just at OpenAI but across the industry. Her worry, she said, is less about the character of any individual leader (though she acknowledged that matters) and more about the absence of structural checks. Good people make bad calls. Well-intentioned organizations drift. Too much attention has been paid to virtue and too little to governance, she suggested.

Chang also politely pressed her on the departures of several high-profile researchers from Thinking Machines in recent months , a subject Murati has largely avoided in public and that she downplayed on Thursday. First, she said, building a frontier AI lab from scratch compresses years of normal organizational volatility into months. She also acknowledged that compensation — the nine-figure packages that have become standard currency in the war for AI talent — captures people’s imaginations, but she suggested it isn’t usually the whole story. To some audience laughter, she said of her own competitive instincts, “When I wake up in the morning, I am not thinking about how to kill the competitor.”

Naturally, Chang asked about what comes next for AI broadly, including for the humans who AI companies once said would be empowered by AI but who’ve more recently grown scared by talk of mass job displacement, not to mention a future where AI is used to create chemical weapons.

Murati, who was born in Albania and speaks with a slight Eastern European accent, was measured in her response. She pushed back on the framing of inevitable dystopia or inevitable utopia, arguing that neither outcome is predetermined and that the period we’re in right now is the one that will determine which way things go. Still, she said — and not for the first time during the interview — that if humans take their hands off the wheel too soon, the future will look very different, and not better.

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News

Osun at crossroads, Adeleke, Oyebamiji others will sign peace accord – ODA

Published

3 hours ago

July 13, 2026

Preport

Indigenes of Osun State in the diaspora, under the auspices of the Osun Development Association (ODA), have declared that the governorship candidates of political parties contesting in the forthcoming election in the state will sign a peace accord ahead of the poll.

ODA noted that this is necessary in view of the prevailing situation in the state and to prevent a breakdown of law and order.

The group explained that the current governor and Accord candidate, Senator Ademola Adeleke; the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Mr Bola Oyebamiji; the Action Alliance candidate, Olanrewaju Farinloye; the African Democratic Congress (ADC) candidate, Najeem Salaam; the African Action Congress (AAC) candidate, Esan Olajide; and other candidates will sign the peace pact.

Chairman of ODA’s Leadership and Governance Committee, Dr Tunji Olugbodi, made the declaration in a statement heralding the planned summit where candidates of the political parties will sign the peace accord to prevent violence before, during and after the election.

Olugbodi, in the statement made available to DAILY POST on Monday evening, explained that the state is currently at a critical democratic crossroads.

He said the summit, with the theme, “Speak, Choose, Hold Accountable: Citizens at the Centre of Osun’s Democracy,” is billed to take place in Osogbo because it is necessary to commit all the major stakeholders to a peaceful electoral process.

Olugbodi added that the group believes the state can set a national benchmark for peaceful, credible elections.

The summit is expected to bring all stakeholders in the electoral process under one roof to chart a way forward in order to prevent any uncertainty before, during and after the election.

Olugbodi said, “Osun State is at a critical democratic crossroads. The Osun Development Association (ODA) has finalised arrangements to host the Osun 2026 Democratic Governance, Peace and Electoral Integrity Summit, a high-level civic intervention designed to steer the state’s political discourse toward issue-based campaigning and away from rising tension ahead of the August governorship election.”

ODA Chairman, Dr Segun Aina, in his contribution, noted that the collective participation of all stakeholders is necessary for the forthcoming election.

Health

Nigeria launches food procurement guidelines to tackle unhealthy diets, improve nutrition

Published

3 hours ago

July 13, 2026

Preport

WhatsApp Image 2026 07 13 at 19.24.17.jpeg

The federal government has launched the National Guidelines for Public Procurement of Food and Related Services.

The framework introduces nutrition standards for food purchased with public funds as part of efforts to reduce unhealthy diets and curb the growing burden of non-communicable diseases in Nigeria.

The guidelines, unveiled on Monday in Abuja at an event themed “Public Procurement of Food: Promoting a Culture of National Wellness Through the Food Value Chain,” are expected to influence food served in public institutions, including schools, hospitals, correctional centres and military establishments, by setting evidence-based standards on nutrition, food safety and quality.

Delivering his keynote address at the launch, the Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, Iziaq Salako, said the initiative marks a shift from viewing public procurement as a routine administrative process to using it as a strategic tool to improve public health and national development.

“When the government demands healthier, safer and more nutritious food, it creates incentives for the entire food system to innovate, improve quality and align with higher public health standards,” he said.

Why it matters

Mr Salako said the government remains the country’s largest institutional purchaser of food, meaning procurement decisions have the potential to influence food production, consumer behaviour and nutrition standards across the food value chain.

According to him, the guidelines establish limits on sodium, sugar and unhealthy fats in foods procured by public institutions while encouraging balanced and nutritious diets.

He said the document complements existing national policies, including the National Guideline for Sodium Reduction, the Trans Fat Regulation and the 2023 National Policy on Food Safety and Quality.

Rising burden of unhealthy diets

Mr Salako noted that unhealthy diets contribute to about 7.2 million deaths globally every year, driven largely by excessive consumption of salt, sugar and unhealthy fats as well as inadequate intake of fruits, vegetables and whole grains.

He revealed that the average Nigerian adult consumes between 3.9 grammes and 4.9 grammes of sodium daily, almost double the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) recommended limit of 2 grammes.

Mr Salako added that increasing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages has contributed to rising rates of obesity and diabetes, prompting the introduction of the sugar-sweetened beverage tax, while industrial trans fats have also been restricted under Nigeria’s Trans Fatty Acid Regulation.

“These measures are designed to control dietary patterns that fuel the growing burden of non-communicable diseases, placing enormous pressure on health systems, national economies and household incomes,” he said.

Child malnutrition remains a concern

Mr Salako also highlighted the country’s persistent nutrition challenges, noting that malnutrition remains a direct or underlying cause of nearly half of the deaths among children under five years.

He said the Nigeria Mini Demographic and Health Survey found that about four in every 10 Nigerian children under five are stunted, while nearly two million children suffer severe acute malnutrition annually.

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“These are not merely health statistics. They represent profound human capital challenges with significant implications for educational attainment, labour productivity, household prosperity, national competitiveness and sustainable economic growth.”

Implementation key

Mr Salako stressed that the success of the guidelines would depend on effective implementation rather than their launch.

He urged procurement and accounting officers across government institutions to ensure compliance, noting that procurement decisions influence health outcomes, productivity and public confidence in government.

He added that the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare would continue to promote disease prevention through healthier public policies as part of efforts to achieve universal health coverage.