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Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

reuters.com

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Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#251

Post by belter »

FL33TW00D wrote: post #250
belter wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their head of AI alignment clearly has no idea on how to go on alignment, as you can see here, during this 30 min rambling into nothing, on the subject. At correct time stamp: https://youtu.be/Wo95ob_s_NI?t=1040 What is in contrast to the published vision of Thinking Machines Lab.

John is not exactly used to interviews. I was more concretely referring to the level of talent in the engineering team, for example Lilian Weng and Horace He. Horace can probably produce $50M of revenue personally per year.

Going just from published research, it seems Lilian Weng focus is LLM agents, safety, and alignment, focusing on how models are used, guided, and evaluated, not how they’re built.

It seems Horace He focuses on deep learning systems and compiler optimization, improving the performance of frameworks like PyTorch.

While both are clearly highly capable, and maybe capable of focusing on other areas, again just from published papers, neither seems to have published work on core LLM architectures or foundational model training, that could help bring about a scientific advance on the performance of current models.

Their contributions seem to be on enhancing usability and efficiency, not the underlying design or scaling of modern LLMs.

If that is the core team, I would be worried if they have the researchers capable of producing a breakthrough worth of the billions committed. But maybe that is why they are still hiring?

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#252

Post by qgin »

belter wrote: post #202
silveraxe93 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's actually that easy, why don't you do it? Are you seriously just leaving $5 billion on the table? I'll tell you why you won't. Because you wouldn't get it. Because it's not that easy. Mira Murati is not some rando off the street. Ilya Sutskever is not some rando. Zuckerberg is not paying Millions to randos of the street to come work for meta.

Tell me one unique skill, from any of those individuals you quoted, that is worth even 0,01% of $5 billion, for a non existent company with a non existent product.

They’ve proven they can launch SOTA models. There are only a handful of people in the world who have that track record.

They know OpenAI’s complete history and roadmap.

They can get a call with any AI researcher on earth.

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#253

Post by belter »

qgin wrote: post #252
belter wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me one unique skill, from any of those individuals you quoted, that is worth even 0,01% of $5 billion, for a non existent company with a non existent product.

They’ve proven they can launch SOTA models. There are only a handful of people in the world who have that track record. They know OpenAI’s complete history and roadmap. They can get a call with any AI researcher on earth.

LLMs are a commodity now. It is all about capital. DeepSeek and Grok proved that.

It’s not Klingon cloaking tech.

With minor variations, it is Transformers via autoregressive next-token prediction on text. Self-attention, residuals, layer norm, positional encodings (RoPE/ALiBi), optimized with AdamW or Lion. Training scales with data, model size, and batch size using LR schedules and distributed parallelism (FSDP, ZeRO, TP). For inference KV caching and probabilistic sampling (temperature, top-k/p).

Most differences are in scale, data quality, and marginal architectural tweaks.

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#254

Post by pdabbadabba »

riku_iki wrote: post #208
pdabbadabba wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your position is that a VC will invest $2B in a startup on vibes alone without having any idea what they're building, because it is not literally their money? That seems like a significantly stronger and less plausible claim than mine, which his merely that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there…

> that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline. there is a funnel of investors: say retirement account holders put money into some retirement fund, fund manager put money into some "innovation fund", "innovation fund" put money in VC fund. All middlemen get % cut, V…

And if those $2B just go poof because they somehow failed to notice what is apparently so obvious to people on his thread -- that there is no real product -- your position is that the VC does not suffer any significant consequences?

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#255

Post by riku_iki »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #254
riku_iki wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline. there is a funnel of investors: say retirement account holders put money into some retirement fund, fund manager put money into some "innovation fund", "innovation fund" put money in VC fund. All middlemen get % cut, V…

And if those $2B just go poof because they somehow failed to notice what is apparently so obvious to people on his thread -- that there is no real product -- your position is that the VC does not suffer any significant consequences?

> your position is that the VC does not suffer any significant consequences?

it is likely they won't suffer any significant consequences

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#257

Post by qgin »

belter wrote: post #253
qgin wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve proven they can launch SOTA models. There are only a handful of people in the world who have that track record. They know OpenAI’s complete history and roadmap. They can get a call with any AI researcher on earth.

LLMs are a commodity now. It is all about capital. DeepSeek and Grok proved that. It’s not Klingon cloaking tech. With minor variations, it is Transformers via autoregressive next-token prediction on text. Self-attention, residuals, layer norm, positional encodings (RoPE/ALiBi), optimized with AdamW or Lion. Training scales with data, model size, and batch size using LR schedules and distributed parallelism (FSDP, Ze…

Meta had the scale and whiffed so bad the entire Llama team disbanded and Zuck has been recruiting new people with 9 figure offers. Capital is essential but the people deciding when to launch the training run still do matter.

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#258

Post by az226 »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #32

Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I realize that they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building, and they have some pretty significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself. Some amount of skepticism is warranted, of course, but a lot of these comments read as closer to…

Probably because people view this grifting as something negative.

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#259

Post by zanellato19 »

awongh wrote: post #180
JCM9 wrote: post #171

On Shark Tank if you walk in and say “I have no revenue, no viable business model, and an idea that’s easily copied in a space that’s rapidly marching towards commoditization. I’m asking for $5 billion for 25% of my company.” You’d be laughed off the set. In the increasingly frothy world of GenAI that’s a Wednesday and you get the cheque. If it looks like a bubble and smells like a bubble… The tech is cool, but inves…

You mean, "I have no revenue and no business model but I was the CTO of one of the most important technical companies of this generation, we put out one of the fastest growing SaaS products of all time in a completely new technical category."- not sure how much more signal you would need than that. I don't really get why anyone would be confused about why they are throwing money at her. It's an extremely large amount…

We have a saying in Brazil that goes "The best thing in the world is QI."

QI meaning Quem Indica, meaning the best thing in the world is not technical skill, but who you know. This is what stuff like this looks like to me.

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#260

Post by rhubarbtree »

ml-anon wrote: post #245
rhubarbtree wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure you can quantify all work, but to the accounts I read she was constantly guiding, scheduling the teams, resolving conflict, allocating resources. Exactly what a CTO does in a company that size. Can’t help but feel there’s some sexism attached to the pushback here.

And what a conflict resolver she was. It even elevated her to the level of CEO. https://makeagif.com/gif/im-actually-not-sure-about-that-mir...

This is a good example of the kind of response I wouldn’t expect if she were male.
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