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Rather than focus on raw power like the frontier labs, the Thinking Machines model was designed to balance “cost against performance,” the company said. Of the nearly 1 trillion parameters that Inkling has, only 41 billion are “active,” meaning that only a fraction of the AI’s “brain” will be woken to deal with any query, making it cheaper and faster to use.
The model can be customized through Thinking Machines’ first product, Tinker, a cloud-based fine-tuning tool for AI developers and researchers released last year. The goal of Tinker is to allow a developer sitting at a laptop to customize and train large industrial AI models without having to worry about the supercomputing infrastructure underneath.
Last month, the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates and Thinking Machines released a report on Bridgewater’s use of Tinker to fine-tune the Chinese open-weights model Qwen3-235B on its own data, leading to a model that Bridgewater said outperformed GPT-5 and Claude Opus on financial document triage, while cutting computing costs by over 13 times. ...
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mira-muratis-ai-startup-releases-first-model-in-bid-to-loosen-ai-giants-grip-e042bb2b