4 quotes from 2 episodes on TBPN, each with a timestamped link to the source.
4 quotes2 episodes
The short version
John Coogan stated that Thinking Machines Lab released an open-weight AI model designed to challenge the market lead of OpenAI and Anthropic. Competing open-weight models often copy data directly from those top providers.
Most interesting insights
Inkling launched without being the most powerful AI model available to the public.
“Inkling is not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed, which is a different frame of reference for many of these model launches.”
A Wall Street Journal report indicates Thinking Machines Lab launched an open-weight model to compete directly with OpenAI and Anthropic. John Coogan highlighted this release.
“Thinking machines lab first, uh, the first model is an open weights model designed to chip away at the lead of OpenAI and anthropics, says the Wall Street Journal…”
Competitors like Kimmy, GLM, Qwen, and Nematron train systems using data distilled from OpenAI and Anthropic. John Coogan stated the new open-weight model avoids this exact practice.
“This is the only open weight model that's trained without distilling from OpenAI or Anthropic. Kimmy distills, GLM distills, Qwen distills, Nematron distills...”
Thinking Machine Lab's new 'Inkling' model, billed as an open-weights competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic, landed right in the middle of a heated debate about AI model originality.
John Coogan claimed Inkling was unique as the "only openweight model" not distilled from OpenAI or Anthropic, distinguishing it from popular models like Kimmy and Deepseek.
Thinking Machines Lab, under Mira Murati, launched Inkling: an open-weight AI model optimized for fine-tuning, aimed directly at challenging OpenAI and Anthropic's market lead, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Inkling's release ignited a heated debate about 'distillation,' its training process that uses synthetic data derived from other open-weight models, pushing the boundaries of what 'pure' open-source truly means.
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