Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Raises $2 Billion for AI Startup That Democratizes Custom Model Creation
Summary
Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati raises $2 billion in seed funding for Thinking Machines Lab, launching Tinker, a revolutionary tool that democratizes custom AI model creation by automating fine-tuning of advanced models like Meta's Llama for researchers, businesses, and hobbyists without requiring extensive technical expertise.
Key Points
- Thinking Machines Lab, led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and other OpenAI veterans, launches Tinker, a tool that automates the creation of custom frontier AI models through fine-tuning
- The startup raises $2 billion in seed funding with a $12 billion valuation, betting that democratizing access to fine-tuning cutting-edge models will be the next major frontier in AI development
- Tinker allows users to fine-tune Meta's Llama and Alibaba's Qwen models through supervised and reinforcement learning, making advanced AI capabilities accessible to researchers, businesses, and hobbyists without requiring extensive technical infrastructure