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Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model

thinkingmachines.ai

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Re: Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model

#51

Post by mannanj »

andriy_koval wrote: post #40
gkapur wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be but there are a host of companies going after open weights models: Arcee, Reflection, Llama (TBD on Meta's focus on closed-source versus open-source), etc. That said, the fine-tuning API + open weight model at least is a semblance of a viable business that could work so I will be curious about it. I'm not sure the synergy is fully there (why is someone with an open weights model privelaged to fine-tune it…

> It could be but there are a host of companies going after open weights models: Arcee, Reflection, Llama (TBD on Meta's focus on closed-source versus open-source), etc. my bet is that Chinese government fund Chinese models way more compared to what those companies receive (except llama, which is outdated but was strong foundation at its time)

I have a similar bet. Looks like people don't like this idea. You got downvoted a lot.

Re: Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model

#52

Post by gkapur »

andriy_koval wrote: post #40
gkapur wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be but there are a host of companies going after open weights models: Arcee, Reflection, Llama (TBD on Meta's focus on closed-source versus open-source), etc. That said, the fine-tuning API + open weight model at least is a semblance of a viable business that could work so I will be curious about it. I'm not sure the synergy is fully there (why is someone with an open weights model privelaged to fine-tune it…

> It could be but there are a host of companies going after open weights models: Arcee, Reflection, Llama (TBD on Meta's focus on closed-source versus open-source), etc. my bet is that Chinese government fund Chinese models way more compared to what those companies receive (except llama, which is outdated but was strong foundation at its time)

The story of Reflection AI is supposedly that the company was faffing and failing at winning in the coding agent space, but was introduced to Jenson, who suggested they build an open-weight model and said he would fund it. That turned into a $2 billion financing with NVIDIA doing roughly $500 million and was a complete pivot.

I think the bet would have to be that a US Open Weight company either: 1. Gets a lot of money from Jenson who views them as a counterbalance to the big labs in his ecosystem and a way to generate leverage (the same way he is positioning neoclouds-- it also could be synergistic with neoclouds who could offer the model serving endpoints) 2. Can fast follow the same way Mistral does (which, honestly, seems like just distilling the Chinese model, which distills the US lab but is pretty innovative on a whole lot of architecture both in training and serving land.) 3. AND figure out some (maybe not super lucrative but lucrative enough) sort of business model, as well. There are lots of possible business models, so I will be curious how this whole space evolves.

Re: Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model

#55

Post by andriy_koval »

gkapur wrote: post #52
andriy_koval wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It could be but there are a host of companies going after open weights models: Arcee, Reflection, Llama (TBD on Meta's focus on closed-source versus open-source), etc. my bet is that Chinese government fund Chinese models way more compared to what those companies receive (except llama, which is outdated but was strong foundation at its time)

The story of Reflection AI is supposedly that the company was faffing and failing at winning in the coding agent space, but was introduced to Jenson, who suggested they build an open-weight model and said he would fund it. That turned into a $2 billion financing with NVIDIA doing roughly $500 million and was a complete pivot. I think the bet would have to be that a US Open Weight company either: 1. Gets a lot of mone…

> That turned into a $2 billion financing with NVIDIA doing roughly $500 million and was a complete pivot.

I suspect 2B is not enough to boostrap frontier model from the scratch (for both talent and hardware)

Re: Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model

#56

Post by 3848488459 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #37
firasd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just serving the model over API seems like a natural fit and is what many of them are doing. So simply being the cloud provider for your own open weight model can be a source of revenue

But so can everyone else. What’s the moat for spending all those billions. I understand the Chinese angle, they need to undermine American models as a matter of statecraft, but what is the business model here? It just seems like VC charity.

[flagged]

Re: Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model

#59

Post by godelski »

buremba wrote: post #20
Aurornis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's ~30% bigger and not as good as GLM 5.2, why would I tinker with this model? The benchmarks never tell the full story. Some of the open weights models have been benchmaxxed for a while. Their utility on real work can be different than the benchmark number. The multimodal input is also a big deal. Having vision input is really helpful for a lot of tasks.

Then why are they publishing the benchmarks which makes them look worse than GLM 5.2?

Because it's still informative

Re: Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model

#60

Post by JimsonYang »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #33

What are the different business models for open-weight AI companies?

Maybe the thesis is that

Open source low cost models will dominate most enterprise tasks as cost curves will dictate usage. TM is trying to replicate that especially as the US and China gets more defensive with their tech

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