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Person: "lilianweng"
not much happened today
inkling thinking-machines-lab huggingface vllm_project lmsysorg modal baseten databricks mixture-of-experts multimodality foundation-models model-licensing context-window open-weights model-release miramurati soumithchintala johnschulman2 lilianweng natolambert artificialanlys scaling01
Thinking Machines Lab launched Inkling, its first fully released open-weights foundation model family, featuring 975B parameters with 41B active parameters in a Mixture-of-Experts architecture. Inkling supports multimodality with text, image, and audio inputs and text output, is Apache 2.0 licensed, and offers up to 1M context window. The model is available on platforms like Tinker, Hugging Face, and partners, with broad ecosystem support from vLLM, SGLang, Modal, Baseten, and Databricks. Key figures such as Mira Murati, Soumith Chintala, John Schulman, and Lilian Weng highlighted its open weights, customization, and practical use focus. Independent commentators noted it as the strongest U.S.-based open-weight release to date, though still behind top Chinese open-weight and best closed models on some benchmarks.
Thinking Machines' Tinker: LoRA based LLM fine-tuning API
qwen-235b-a22b sora-2 thinking-machines openai fine-tuning lora model-training api model-optimization distributed-training post-training-methods research-productivity video-generation content-moderation engagement-patterns karpathy lilianweng sama
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.