Frozen AI News archive

Thinking Machines'' Tinker: LoRA based LLM fine-tuning API

**Thinking Machines** recently raised **$2 billion** without shipping a product until now, launching their first product **Tinker**, a managed service API for fine-tuning large and mixture-of-experts models like **Qwen-235B-A22B** using **LoRA** for cost-efficient training. The Tinker API offers low-level primitives for post-training methods and is supported by an open-source **Tinker Cookbook** library. Influential AI figures like **Andrej Karpathy** and **Lilian Weng** praised its design for reducing complexity and boosting research productivity. Meanwhile, **OpenAI** launched **Sora 2**, a video+audio model integrated into their consumer social app, sparking viral engagement and concerns over misuse and content moderation. Sam Altman emphasized the product's dual focus on delight and revenue alongside AGI research.

Canonical issue URL

Could have been named Thinker?

AI News for 9/30/2025-10/1/2025. We checked 12 subreddits, 544 Twitters and 23 Discords (196 channels, and 6687 messages) for you. Estimated reading time saved (at 200wpm): 497 minutes. Our new website is now up with full metadata search and beautiful vibe coded presentation of all past issues. See https://news.smol.ai/ for the full news breakdowns and give us feedback on @smol_ai!

The timing is oddly coincidental indeed:

Per their landing page:

Tinker lets you fine-tune a short list of large and small open-weight models, including large mixture-of-experts models such as Qwen-235B-A22B. Switching from a small model to a large one is as simple as changing a single string in your Python code.

Tinker is a managed service that runs on our internal clusters and training infrastructure. We handle scheduling, resource allocation, and failure recovery. This allows you to get small or large runs started immediately, without worrying about managing infrastructure. We use LoRA so that we can share the same pool of compute between multiple training runs, lowering costs.

Tinker’s API gives you low-level primitives like forward_backward and sample, which can be used to express most common post-training methods. Even so, achieving good results requires getting many details right. That’s why we’re releasing an open-source library, the Tinker Cookbook, with modern implementations of post-training methods that run on top of the Tinker API.

This small API surface area seems a very well received abstraction - as Andrej says, "You retain 90% of algorithmic creative control (usually related to data, loss function, the algorithm) while tinker handles the hard parts that you usually want to touch much less often (infra, forward/backward of the LLM itself, distributed training), meaning you can do these at well below <<10% of typical complexity involved."

Lilian (biased) agrees: "Providing high quality research tooling is one of the most effective ways to improve research productivity of the wider community and Tinker API is one step towards our mission there."

There's a waitlist, and mind the terms of service. But one does hope that this first product is just a harbinger of much larger, ambitious things...


AI Twitter Recap

OpenAI’s Sora 2 app: product, platform effects, and early stress tests

DeepSeek V3.2 and DSA: cheaper long context at scale, day-0 ecosystem support

Claude Sonnet 4.5: coding/agent upgrades and availability tweaks

Zhipu’s GLM‑4.6: efficiency-first release, agent-centric improvements

Post-training infrastructure steps up: Thinking Machines’ Tinker

Research and systems highlights

Top tweets (by engagement)


AI Reddit Recap

/r/LocalLlama + /r/localLLM Recap

1. Alibaba Qwen 100M-ctx/10T-param Roadmap & Tencent Hunyuan Image 3.0 Teaser

2. Fenghua No.3 DX12/Vulkan GPU & Uncensored 'Abliterated' LLM Fine-tune Outcomes

Less Technical AI Subreddit Recap

/r/Singularity, /r/Oobabooga, /r/MachineLearning, /r/OpenAI, /r/ClaudeAI, /r/StableDiffusion, /r/ChatGPT, /r/ChatGPTCoding, /r/aivideo, /r/aivideo

1. OpenAI Sora 2 Launch and Demo Showcases

2. Gemini 3.0 Update Speculation and CS Job Market Angst

3. Wan-Alpha RGBA Video Release and Minecraft Redstone LLM


AI Discord Recap

A summary of Summaries of Summaries by gpt-5

1. OpenAI Sora 2 Rollout & Real-World Usage

2. Developer Tooling: Billing, Tracking, and Throughput

3. New Models & Research: Trillions, RL on Pretraining, and Sparse Attention

4. Industry Momentum: Big Checks, Context Tricks, and Benchmark Reality


Discord: High level Discord summaries

Perplexity AI Discord


LMArena Discord


OpenRouter Discord


Cursor Community Discord


Unsloth AI (Daniel Han) Discord


OpenAI Discord


HuggingFace Discord


LM Studio Discord


Latent Space Discord


GPU MODE Discord


Nous Research AI Discord


Yannick Kilcher Discord


aider (Paul Gauthier) Discord


Manus.im Discord Discord


Eleuther Discord


Modular (Mojo 🔥) Discord


Moonshot AI (Kimi K-2) Discord


DSPy Discord


tinygrad (George Hotz) Discord


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Discord: Detailed by-Channel summaries and links

Perplexity AI ▷ #general (997 messages🔥🔥🔥):

Sora 2, Free Perplexity Pro, Grok vs. ChatGPT


Perplexity AI ▷ #sharing (7 messages):

Sora 2 Release, Comet Invite Referral


Perplexity AI ▷ #pplx-api (1 messages):

.idothehax: oh


LMArena ▷ #general (997 messages🔥🔥🔥):

Claude API Free Use, Seedream 4 Nerfs, Ethical AI Discussion, Sora 2 Invite Codes, Image Generation Issues


LMArena ▷ #announcements (2 messages):

October AI Generation Contest, Arena Champions Role, Abstract Art Image Contest, Video Gen Contest Winner


OpenRouter ▷ #announcements (3 messages):

Stripe Integration, Usage Based Billing, BYOK Requests


OpenRouter ▷ #app-showcase (2 messages):

Channel Privacy, RPG users, LLM Mixture


OpenRouter ▷ #general (662 messages🔥🔥🔥):

Grok model issues, Object generation, Sora video model, Roleplay with Grok, AWS Bedrock


OpenRouter ▷ #discussion (24 messages🔥):

Sora Invite Codes, Sora API Endpoint, Sora Access Requirements, OpenAI vs Google, Sora.com and BYOK


Cursor Community ▷ #general (671 messages🔥🔥🔥):

Cursor student program, Sonnet 4.5 token usage, Cursor Agent bugs, Deepseek v3.2 addition, AI social network platform


Unsloth AI (Daniel Han) ▷ #general (339 messages🔥🔥):

GRPO trainer, Fine Tuning, Blackwell GPU


Unsloth AI (Daniel Han) ▷ #introduce-yourself (13 messages🔥):

New member introductions, Blockchain applications, AI in problem-solving


Unsloth AI (Daniel Han) ▷ #off-topic (143 messages🔥🔥):

Gemma Fine-Tuning, Sora 2, AI Models and Self-Awareness, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), torchcodec Issues


Unsloth AI (Daniel Han) ▷ #help (67 messages🔥🔥):

GRIT algorithm + Qlora based finetuning, AgentGYM, Gemma 3n 4b it - 16 bit model, Qwen 2.5 72B fine-tuning with Unsloth on Runpod, Multi-GPU with Llama-server


Unsloth AI (Daniel Han) ▷ #research (5 messages):

ReLU Bug, Shifted Tanh, Gradient Explosion


OpenAI ▷ #ai-discussions (398 messages🔥🔥):

Sora 2 invites, GLM 4.6 vs Sonnet 4.5, AI-powered tool ideas, Deepfakes and photorealistic prompts


OpenAI ▷ #gpt-4-discussions (9 messages🔥):

GPT-5's SQL skills, Instant generation, Bandwidth throttling, Thinking Mode


OpenAI ▷ #prompt-engineering (7 messages):

ChatGPT and Canvas, Human Writing Prompts


OpenAI ▷ #api-discussions (7 messages):

ChatGPT and Canvas, Human writing prompts


HuggingFace ▷ #announcements (1 messages):

ML for Science projects, Trackio library, Watermarking with Gradio, HF Inference Providers in VS Code, Public AI on HF Inference Providers


HuggingFace ▷ #general (196 messages🔥🔥):

Crisper Whisper Integration, Lora Training, Medical AI Opinion, RTX 4090 modded cards, ComfyUI Crashing


HuggingFace ▷ #cool-finds (1 messages):

Foundational Models, New Research Paper


HuggingFace ▷ #i-made-this (2 messages):

CloudOpsBERT, IaC concurrency


HuggingFace ▷ #computer-vision (1 messages):

Live benchmarks, Arenas for vision tasks, Satellite imagery, Drone imagery, Datasets


HuggingFace ▷ #smol-course (4 messages):

Broken Quiz Links, Course Tips


HuggingFace ▷ #agents-course (3 messages):

Agent Course


LM Studio ▷ #general (162 messages🔥🔥):

vLLM Parallel Requests, LM Studio and AVX2, LM Studio Reddit Ban, Qwen3-Omni Support, LM Studio Parallelism


LM Studio ▷ #hardware-discussion (33 messages🔥):

AMD 495+, Strix Halo, 3090 Memory Bandwidth, Mobile chips


Latent Space ▷ #ai-general-chat (99 messages🔥🔥):

Amazon's next-gen AI devices, Ring-1T Model, Gemini 2.5 image editing, EigenCloud AI verification, Cerebras funding


Latent Space ▷ #genmedia-creative-ai (4 messages):

Sora 2, Puppet Explainer Videos, Chris's New Gig


GPU MODE ▷ #general (13 messages🔥):

Learning PTX and CUDA, FP8 support in RTX 4090, Code organization strategies, GEMM implementation, cuBLAS performance


GPU MODE ▷ #triton (1 messages):

Triton Developer Conference 2025, GPU MODE State of Triton, NVIDIA Blackwell GPU backend for Triton, Triton-distributed computation


GPU MODE ▷ #cuda (2 messages):

Kernel Function Addresses, Tensor Core Evolution, Kimbo Chen


GPU MODE ▷ #torch (1 messages):

Torch Dynamo Compile Times, Measuring impact of recompilations, Autotuning


GPU MODE ▷ #cool-links (2 messages):

Determinism, NVIDIA Determinism, Deep Learning Determinism, LLM inference determinism


GPU MODE ▷ #beginner (5 messages):

Benchmarking Guides, benchmarking opinions, youtube benchmarking


GPU MODE ▷ #pmpp-book (4 messages):

Fundamentals Book, Hardware Instructions


GPU MODE ▷ #rocm (1 messages):

AMD core file analysis, rocgdb debugging


GPU MODE ▷ #metal (1 messages):

bghira: now we just have to wait for a sub-685B model to run it with..


GPU MODE ▷ #self-promotion (1 messages):

Free AI learning, Free CS Learning, Open Source Educational Resources


GPU MODE ▷ #edge (1 messages):

Radiation Shielding, Orin Radiation Testing, Hardware Watchdogs


GPU MODE ▷ #submissions (6 messages):

MI300x8, amd-gemm-rs Leaderboard, amd-ag-gemm Leaderboard


GPU MODE ▷ #status (2 messages):

Triangle Multiplicative Update


GPU MODE ▷ #factorio-learning-env (4 messages):

Debugging factorio-learning-env, Google Meet Link


GPU MODE ▷ #cutlass (34 messages🔥):

cute.nvgpu.warp.MmaF16BF16Op documentation, TiledMMA broadcasting, Distributed GEMM in CuTe, UMMA tensor core


GPU MODE ▷ #general (3 messages):

TriMul Competition, GPGPU solution, Operator Fusion, A100, MI300


GPU MODE ▷ #multi-gpu (19 messages🔥):

NVLink Multicast, Multimem Instructions, NVShmem Wrappers, Peer GPU L2 Cache, NVLink SHARP


GPU MODE ▷ #llmq (2 messages):

Mega Kernel Projects, 20B Model Training, Gradient Norm Concerns


Nous Research AI ▷ #general (80 messages🔥🔥):

Sequence expansion transformers, GLM 4.5 vs GLM 4.6, DDR5 RAM, Sora 2, Nous Chat Web


Nous Research AI ▷ #ask-about-llms (2 messages):

LLMs with Lower Cosine Similarity, GPT-OSS-120B


Nous Research AI ▷ #research-papers (2 messages):

Aigo.ai, Symbolica, Augmented Intelligence (AUI), After Thought (Stealth), Symbolic Architectures


Nous Research AI ▷ #interesting-links (1 messages):

DeepSeek Sparse Attention, Mamba selectivity


Nous Research AI ▷ #research-papers (2 messages):

Symbolic Architectures, Aigo.ai, Symbolica, AUI Augmented Intelligence


Yannick Kilcher ▷ #general (14 messages🔥):

Thematic Roles, Detecting AI Generated Videos, Path patching


Yannick Kilcher ▷ #paper-discussion (6 messages):

Latent-Reasoning Survey, VLM Circuits Analysis, Reasoning with RL on Pretraining Data


Yannick Kilcher ▷ #ml-news (9 messages🔥):

Sora 1 vs Sora 2, ByteDance and Tencent vs Sora, AlphaEvolve LLM, Sam Altman unnatural movement, WanLynx alternative to Sam Altman


aider (Paul Gauthier) ▷ #general (24 messages🔥):

aider MCP, aider forks with MCP support, local LLMs with aider, LM Studio issues, Qwen coder 30b and devstral 24b


aider (Paul Gauthier) ▷ #questions-and-tips (4 messages):

Apriel-1.5-15b, llama.cpp support, koboldcpp output templates, DeepWiki page


Manus.im Discord ▷ #general (27 messages🔥):

Manus stuck in loop, Aseel-Manus Memory Key Protocol, AI automation agencies, Manus credit usage, Sora invite code


Eleuther ▷ #general (1 messages):

AI Researcher, Multi Agent Systems, MoE, RL, AI for Software Engineering


Eleuther ▷ #research (16 messages🔥):

Adaptive Searching Improvements, Sparse Attention in DeepSeek Model, Meta-Studies in AI Research, Benchmark Usage Analysis, Implicit Values in ML Research


Eleuther ▷ #lm-thunderdome (2 messages):

GSM8k benchmark, RWKV7Qwen3Hybrid5NoPE-8B-251001Faced performance, Llama-3-8B evaluation


Modular (Mojo 🔥) ▷ #mojo (10 messages🔥):

Windows Release, Mojo Notebook Support, Stack Overflow Survey


Modular (Mojo 🔥) ▷ #max (5 messages):

MAX on Cerebras, Mojo X Max AI Projects


Moonshot AI (Kimi K-2) ▷ #general-chat (13 messages🔥):

OpenAI's TikTok Ad, Chinese Model Censorship, API Version Comparisons


DSPy ▷ #general (10 messages🔥):

LiteLLM vs DSPy, Prompt Engineering, LLM Caching


tinygrad (George Hotz) ▷ #general (3 messages):

CLSPV Crashes, Shape Tracker Bounty, ShapeTracker Deletion