This $12 billion startup finally shipped something...

Fireship

Summary

The video details the journey of Mira Murati's startup, Thinking Machines, which garnered a $12 billion valuation before releasing a product. They recently launched Inkling, a fully open-weights, multi-modal AI model that can process visual, auditory, and textual data directly. Built by former OpenAI talent, Inkling utilizes a Mixture of Experts architecture for computational efficiency. While not a top performer in raw intelligence benchmarks, its unique 'thinking effort' dial allows users to control accuracy versus cost. A key innovation is its training in 'epistemics,' where it's rewarded for admitting what it doesn't know, making it skilled at forecasting. The company's strategy is to offer Inkling as a free, adaptable model, with fine-tuning services via their Tinker API as the primary revenue stream, emphasizing specialized utility over general superiority. The video also highlights Clerk for auth, billing, and user management.

Chapters

  1. 0:00Mira Murati's New Venture
  2. 0:53Building Tinker and Inkling
  3. 1:53Inkling's Performance and Features
  4. 3:14Inkling's Smart Design
  5. 4:21Sponsor: Clerk for Agents

Topics covered

  • Mira Murati's Career Transition
  • Thinking Machines Founding and Valuation

+6 more topics (full content when you follow the channel)

Transcript excerpt

Two years ago, Mira Murati did something we've all fantasized about. She woke up, decided she'd had enough of her boss, and quit her job as CTO of OpenAI with no backup plan and nothing but a vague desire to create time and space for her own exploration. If you or I did that, we'd probably end up coding HTML for food down on Market Street. But when someone like Mira does it, A16Z shows up with a $2 billion investment into any company she decides to build. The company was eventually Thinking Machines, and until last week, it's been known for being valued at $12 billion before having actually shipped anything. But that may have now just changed because they just released Inkling, a fully open weights model trained from scratch that can see, hear, reason, fine-tune, and potentially touch things in the real world. In today's video, we'll find out how it was built, what makes it interesting,…