๐ป The Blank Slate AI Strategy: Why Thinking Machines Is Giving Away a 975B-Parameter Model
Tomasz Tunguz draws a parallel between Slate Auto's $24,950 bare-bones electric pickup and Thinking Machines Lab's new Inkling model - a 975-billion-parameter, Apache-2.0 licensed model trained on 45 trillion tokens, released for free. Both ship a deliberately unremarkable, general-purpose base cheap, then monetize the customization layer: Slate sells accessories, Thinking Machines rents fine-tuning compute through its Tinker platform. For investors, this signals a maturing open-source AI business model: give away the weights to seed a platform, then charge for customization, much like infrastructure plays that monetize downstream usage rather than the base product.
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