Re:Tinker by Thinking Machines
by neilv on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @03:04PM
(#45441848)
There was a famous tech company in supercomputing and AI, called "Thinking Machines", worked at by people such as Danny Hillis and even Richard Feynman.
Does this new company have some connection to that, such as some of the same people?
Re:Tinker by Thinking Machines
by palmotea on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @03:17PM
(#45442011)
> Does this new company have some connection to that, such as some of the same people?
Really doubt it. This "Thinking Machines" seems like an on-trend SV AI software startup, that "Thinking Machines" was a Massachusetts-based hardware company that went bankrupt 30 years ago (and whatever's left is Oracle). That "Thinking Machines" people are retiring by now.
I wonder if Sun/Oracle let the trademark lapse, because if it's still active I'd imagine this startup's gonna get sued.
Re:Tinker by Thinking Machines
by staticshock on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @03:21PM
(#45442073)
nope, this is Mira Murati's thinking machines. she used to be the CTO of OpenAI, but started her own thing once she [I think] realized that she was missing out on the gold rush by staying there.
Re:Tinker by Thinking Machines
by fxtentacle on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @03:43PM
(#45442395)
"the Tinker API provides simple functions to compute gradients, update the weights, and sample outputs from the trained model"
It sure sounds like a PyTorch tutorial, but I believe it's yet another "AI training made slightly easier for you" start-up. But all of them seem to solve the easy problem of managing data and compute, while very few tackle the hard problem of generating good training data.
Re:Tinker by Thinking Machines
by tinyhouse on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @03:09PM
(#45441907)
This is great as we need more solutions that help people train and fine-tune models. There is a lot of open source and some companies behind some of the popular open source packages, like Unsloth, but the more the merrier, esp given that Thinking Machines has the expertise and resources to build something that last.
Re:Tinker by Thinking Machines
by NitpickLawyer on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @03:24PM
(#45442104)
Yeah, I'm really curious about their stacked multi-tenant lora training at the same time. If this gets commoditised enough, it could be interesting to try "end of the day fine-tunes on daily conversations" and see where that leads. Or a targeted RL on "missed / rejected tasks" for an agent, after you get enough samples for a run, and so on.
Re:Tinker by Thinking Machines
by wmf on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @03:46PM
(#45442429)
That's a fair valuation if they have a >10% chance of developing a frontier model. It's an excessive valuation if they just release tools to create LoRAs and such.
Does this new company have some connection to that, such as some of the same people?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation
Really doubt it. This "Thinking Machines" seems like an on-trend SV AI software startup, that "Thinking Machines" was a Massachusetts-based hardware company that went bankrupt 30 years ago (and whatever's left is Oracle). That "Thinking Machines" people are retiring by now.
I wonder if Sun/Oracle let the trademark lapse, because if it's still active I'd imagine this startup's gonna get sued.
Which makes the hero image on this page being a diagram of Danny Hillis' TinkerToy computer all the more baffling.
It sure sounds like a PyTorch tutorial, but I believe it's yet another "AI training made slightly easier for you" start-up. But all of them seem to solve the easy problem of managing data and compute, while very few tackle the hard problem of generating good training data.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/mira-muratis-ai-startup-t...