[HN Gopher] Announcing Tinker
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Announcing Tinker
Author : pr337h4m
Score : 90 points
Date : 2025-10-01 18:20 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thinkingmachines.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (thinkingmachines.ai)
| sh3rl0ck wrote:
| They mention their "cookbooks" but I couldn't find them... Their
| blog was immensely interesting so I could see this being a good
| entrypoint
| danobi wrote:
| https://github.com/thinking-machines-lab/tinker-cookbook
| neilv wrote:
| There was a famous tech company in supercomputing and AI, called
| "Thinking Machines", worked at by people such as Danny Hillis and
| even Richard Feynman.
|
| Does this new company have some connection to that, such as some
| of the same people?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation
| palmotea wrote:
| > Does this new company have some connection to that, such as
| some of the same people?
|
| Really doubt it. This "Thinking Machines" seems like an on-
| trend SV AI software startup, that "Thinking Machines" was a
| Massachusetts-based hardware company that went bankrupt 30
| years ago (and whatever's left is Oracle). That "Thinking
| Machines" people are retiring by now.
|
| I wonder if Sun/Oracle let the trademark lapse, because if it's
| still active I'd imagine this startup's gonna get sued.
| jsnell wrote:
| No relation AFAIK, this is Mira Murati's post-OpenAI joint.
|
| Which makes the hero image on this page being a diagram of
| Danny Hillis' TinkerToy computer all the more baffling.
| [deleted]
| staticshock wrote:
| nope, this is Mira Murati's thinking machines. she used to be
| the CTO of OpenAI, but started her own thing once she [I think]
| realized that she was missing out on the gold rush by staying
| there.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| This is great as we need more solutions that help people train
| and fine-tune models. There is a lot of open source and some
| companies behind some of the popular open source packages, like
| Unsloth, but the more the merrier, esp given that Thinking
| Machines has the expertise and resources to build something that
| last.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Yeah, I'm really curious about their stacked multi-tenant lora
| training at the same time. If this gets commoditised enough, it
| could be interesting to try "end of the day fine-tunes on daily
| conversations" and see where that leads. Or a targeted RL on
| "missed / rejected tasks" for an agent, after you get enough
| samples for a run, and so on.
| Oras wrote:
| Isn't this a feature offered by many LLM providers? What's your
| USP here?
| aabhay wrote:
| It is? Which ones give you distributed post training of MoE
| LLMs?
| closewith wrote:
| The name chosen is an antiquated ethnic slur in much of the
| Anglosphere.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| I've never heard of this in my life. Isn't tinker a verb
| meaning to fiddle or edit or modify in small increments? That
| seems like the perfect name given what the software they're
| present. In any case I guess this is back to the debate: does
| it matter how a word is intended or does it matter how a word
| is received?
| echelon wrote:
| Never heard this before either.
|
| I googled "Tinker Slur" and Gemini said this:
|
| > The term "tinker" is a racial slur when used against Irish
| and Scottish Travellers and Romani people. Originally derived
| from the name of an itinerant profession, the word evolved
| into a derogatory ethnic insult with connotations of being
| dirty, dishonest, and criminal.
|
| Further sources:
|
| https://hatebase.org/vocabulary/tinker
|
| https://www.threads.com/@yourlocaltj/post/DCbY6wMIJ7J?hl=en
|
| TIL
|
| Shame that people do this. It's been a salient word all my
| life, and it's a useful word too.
|
| I'll keep calling myself a tinkerer.
| labrador wrote:
| I'm an American of Irish and Scottish descent with some
| travellers in my background. Never heard this word as a
| slur, only as "I like to tinker with machines." Tinker as a
| slur hasn't travelled off the islands of Great Britain
| apparently.
|
| Edit: I'm not changing my usage of the word. I like to
| tinker.
| closewith wrote:
| I suspect you're just not aware of how others consider
| the way you choose to speak: https://archive.is/WydpC
| echelon wrote:
| Authored by William Safire [1], who also authored the "In
| Event of Moon Disaster" speech [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Safire
|
| [2] https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-
| libraries/events...
| kgwgk wrote:
| Interesting that you link to an article that has no
| issues with the word "tinker".
| overscore wrote:
| Yes, it is, and 37 years later, it is no longer
| acceptable to use such terms.
| goopypoop wrote:
| your usage is fine there too.
|
| however, "the islands of Great Britain" is offensive to
| the Irish
| labrador wrote:
| Don't I know it. My Irish grandmother hated the British,
| but Northern Ireland is currently British - for now.
| closewith wrote:
| The ethnic slur predates (and is the etymology of) the
| meaning you're familiar with.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Meanings become obsolete. Calling someone "nice" used to
| mean they were stupid.
| gs17 wrote:
| Do you have a source for this? I can't find any etymology
| dictionary that says it doesn't come from either "tin" as
| in the metal or "tink" as an onomatopoeia (or a verb that
| refers to mending things). To be fair, they say it's
| uncertain, but you seem very confident about your
| alternative etymology.
| overscore wrote:
| The formation etymology (whether from tin or
| onomatopoeia) is uncertain. The part that is certain is
| the semantic chronology. The noun tinker was used from at
| least the 13th century for an itinerant mender of pots,
| the Travellers. By the 16th century it became a slur for
| Travellers.
|
| The verb to tinker doesn't appear until the mid-17th
| century, first meaning to work as a tinker and only later
| coming to mean what you're familiar with.
|
| So while the root word's sound-shape is debated, the
| order of senses is clear: the Traveller sense comes
| first, the modern "casual repair" sense comes later and
| was derived from it. This is the etymological order given
| in all sources, eg https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/dictionary/tinker
| gs17 wrote:
| > eg https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tinker
|
| Does this page show something different in your region?
| For me it doesn't say anything about what you're claiming
| it does outside of one "chiefly Ireland, sometimes
| offensive" definition. The etymology only says "Middle
| English tinkere", and the history explicitly states its
| first use as being the not-"chiefly Ireland, sometimes
| offensive" definition.
| buildbot wrote:
| Interesting, Robert Jordan basically directly lifts that
| term for the Romani-esque tinkers in Wheel of Time.
| closewith wrote:
| > does it matter how a word is intended or does it matter how
| a word is received?
|
| If you apply that argument to an ethnic slur that's common
| where you live, you'll see that it wouldn't be a good product
| name in an international market.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Almost anything can be a slur in some context.
|
| Back in the '90s, people would say "oh he's 'special'" as a
| slur.
|
| That being said, in a world like we live in today, pretty
| much anything you say or do will offend _someone_ for some
| obscure reason that you just can 't reasonably anticipate.
|
| It's in these contexts that I think the most appropriate
| response is "get a life."
| overscore wrote:
| > Almost anything can be a slur in some context.
|
| Eh, this is a very particular and long-standing racist
| term, and the meaning used by the authors is derived from
| the slur, so it's not incidental.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| This does not look like a slur:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker
| https://www.dictionary.com/browse/tinker
|
| There's also rather significant modern use of "tinker":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_(disambiguation)
|
| It appears that you're getting stuck on "tinker _s_ ",
| which is mentioned in the above disambiguation page:
|
| > Tinkers, an alternate (and often pejorative) name
|
| Anyway, language is malleable and changes. In this case,
| I will again emphasize "get a life."
| overscore wrote:
| Tinker was a Traveller slur long before the verb -
| denying that is just wilful ignorance itself.
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tinker
| goopypoop wrote:
| let's not sanction being niggardly when mooting intent
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| How much of the Anglosphere?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It is. But honestly, fuck that. It has a colloquial meaning
| that carries none of that baggage. Instead of retiring the
| word, why not make the racist definition archaic?
| overscore wrote:
| The colloquial meaning carries all of that baggage. You just
| weren't aware.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _colloquial meaning carries all of that baggage. You just
| weren 't aware_
|
| The baggage--hell, all meaning in language--is carried by
| awareness. We don't consider the word hostile racist
| because we're not ancient Romans facing the _hostis_.
|
| Maybe there is a cause to censor the word tinker in British
| English. What there isn't is censoring it in American or
| international English.
| aeon_ai wrote:
| Good thing it's been forgotten enough that almost nobody knows
| that, or cares it's the name of this company.
|
| I think if anyone is offended by a word that is not used by
| anyone in that context, they're probably due for some self-
| reflection on what offends their sensibilities.
| overscore wrote:
| It's definitely not forgotten? What makes you think that?
| Commonly used in Ireland, the UK, Australia, Canada, parts of
| the US.
|
| > they're probably due for some self-reflection on what
| offends their sensibilities.
|
| Or maybe what they're willing to accept?
| sentientslug wrote:
| You are going on a very weird crusade in this thread.
| Literally have never heard this in my life used as any kind
| of slur and here you are arguing with everyone about it.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| This company was most recently valued at $12 billion. Tell me
| there's not an AI bubble.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/mira-muratis-ai-startup-t...
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| They seem to position themselves to commoditise renting shovels
| to use with your own data. Seems pretty bubble-safe to me.
| wmf wrote:
| That's a fair valuation if they have a >10% chance of
| developing a frontier model. It's an excessive valuation if
| they just release tools to create LoRAs and such.
| vin92997 wrote:
| Given that Thinking Machines has employed so many smart
| scientists, focusing solely on infra and fine-tuning is kind of a
| letdown.
| babelfish wrote:
| I feel like this is what the current team excelled at at
| OpenAI, only makes sense that they would productize it
| fxtentacle wrote:
| "the Tinker API provides simple functions to compute gradients,
| update the weights, and sample outputs from the trained model"
|
| It sure sounds like a PyTorch tutorial, but I believe it's yet
| another "AI training made slightly easier for you" start-up. But
| all of them seem to solve the easy problem of managing data and
| compute, while very few tackle the hard problem of generating
| good training data.
| apcragg wrote:
| Funny timing that they are announcing their first product days
| after Matt Levine highlighted their lack of a public product or
| direction in the Money Stuff newsletter.
| sentientslug wrote:
| Their lack of a public product has been widely discussed for at
| least a month now
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| It's the first that came to mind when I saw the domain name but
| I'm sure he's not the first to point it out. So it probably is
| just inevitable that they'd be launching after _someone_ has
| mentioned it during the last couple of hours /days.
| latchkey wrote:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-09-29/the...
| rotskoff wrote:
| My research group at Stanford has been alpha testing Tinker, it's
| both very useful and also really technically impressive in my
| opinion. It's a unified framework for post-training models and it
| abstracts almost all of the complexity of managing these jobs
| across resources. That it manages to do this while also allowing
| a lot of algorithmic flexibility is pretty unique.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| Silly question: how is it different from, say, hf's
| transformers and similar libraries and APIs?
| stephenroller wrote:
| with hf transformers, you still need to manage GPUs
| hamonrye wrote:
| A/B testing the python scripts
| paxys wrote:
| Interesting that their first product is an infrastructure play.
| Is it really so hard to set up a fine-tuning pipeline for
| yourself that a $12 billion startup with unlimited hype needs to
| be offering it? Maybe they have figured, whether correctly or
| not, that building AI tooling is going to be more lucrative than
| the AI itself.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| Commonly attempting the "private beta with a waitlist" pseudo-
| release model (until they finally learned their lesson relatively
| recently) is a large part of how google fumbled the LLM ball to
| OpenAI and others.
| dlojudice wrote:
| > Tinker is a flexible API for efficiently fine-tuning open
| source models with LoRA.
|
| It would be great if they offered inference from the trained
| model as well. Ideally pay per token.
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