Ep 876: The Most Important AI Model You’ll Probably Never Use That Just Dropped (Replay)

Jordan Wilson (0:02)

One of the more important AI models you've probably never heard of and likely won't use just got released. This may get slept on, but Inklings is a huge release from Thinking Machines Lab. So if you haven't heard of Thinking Machines, they're led by Mira Muradi, the former CTO of OpenAI. So why is Inklings maybe the most important AI model you probably won't use? Because it's now the best open source model from an American company and Thinking Machines is betting on the future of AI, fine-tuning as a service. The model itself, though, it's multimodal, it's agentic, it's customizable and it's available through enterprise distribution on day one. Inklings doesn't need to beat every Chinese model or Claude Fable to be relevant. It only needs to peak the interests of a few cost-conscious enterprises to not only be extremely profitable but to also help shift the conversation around enterprise AI. Frontier models are becoming so powerful, they can actually fine-tune smaller practical models without much iteration or without even much expertise.

So, has a new category re-emerged? Is fine-tuning back? And what might Thinking Machines' first major product mean for the broader AI competition? Well, here's the big picture. Inkling could change how enterprises buy AI. So, this was just released Wednesday, so hours ago. And it is not the smartest model, but it is strategically important. I think it gives companies a credible American open-weight model alternative to Chinese models. And Inkling could be the best general-purpose open model because it is multi-modal. A lot of the open-source, open-weight Chinese models aren't. Many of them are text-only. So, Inkling, it is multi-modal. It is agentic. And as workflows in the real world lag so far behind model capabilities, I do think that there is a real market for bespoke, middle-of-the-pack AI.

So, on today's show, here's what you're going to learn. You're going to learn why an open model matters, even if you're never going to deploy it. You're going to understand how Inkling re-opens enterprise AI options beyond just Chinese open models. You're going to know why frontier models could make fine-tuning practical beyond research teams. And you're going to know how model shopping is going to change budgets, vendors and competitive leverage. All right, let's get to it. Welcome to Everyday AI. If you're new here, my name is Jordan Wilson. We do this every day. It's your daily live stream podcast in free daily newsletter, helping business leaders like you and me keep up with the nonstop AI updates. Cause my gosh, can't take an hour off. I help you decide what's important. I tell you how to use all this information to grow your company and your career. So it starts here with the unedited unscripted live stream podcast, but make sure you go to our website at youreverydayai.com. That's your cheat code. We're going to be not just recapping the highlights from today's show, but go sign up for our free daily newsletter. We're going to be giving you everything else that you need to know that's happening in the world of AI today. Cause yeah, it's one of those things you gotta like go and work it out. It's a muscle. Use it every single day.

And yeah, all the AI news will be in our newsletter. All right, let's get into it. Live stream audience. Good to see you. Adam joining us from St. Louis, Jose from Santiago. Angie joining from Montana, Amico, Tokyo. Brian, what's up, Brian? Joining from Minnesota. So let's talk about maybe the most important AI model you'll probably never use. So there's a lot of different factors that have been compounding over the last, I would say, three months. And to put it in a very short summary, frontier models are probably, for the most part, too much for many enterprises, right? I'll say this, probably the Fortune 500, they can squeeze as much juice and make it worth the cost. But I'd say for many companies, especially those probably in the Fortune 5 or like the Fortune 501 to the 5,000, right? So this isn't everyone.

I don't think this changes the equation for every single company, every single business out there, because so many people are still going to want their ChatGPT enterprise, their Gemini, their Clod, their Copilot. They want to make things easy and they're not necessarily looking at, okay, how do open models or fine-tuning models change our strategy? But for so many in our audience, it does. And this is a really big deal.

So here's a little bit more about the model itself. So the model is from Thinking Machines and it's called Inkling. It is a 975 billion parameter model and it's multimodal, so text, images and audio. What is interesting as well, previously Thinking Machines did demo kind of a similar dual purpose or two-way street audio model as well, so that can kind of hear and listen as well as talk at the same time, like OpenAI's new GPT live. So, Inkling is led by former OpenAI CTO, Meera Murati, and its quick arrival raises, I think the next big question, which is how good is it? Well, here's from the company themselves, from their release, they say, our model called Inkling is a mixture of experts transformer with 975 billion total parameters, 41 billion active. It supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens. It was pre-trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio and video. It is the first in a family of models of different sizes. Alongside it, we are sharing a preview of Inkling Small, a lighter weight model with 12 billion active parameters, trained with a smaller recipe that achieves strong performance with even lower costs and latency. Inkling reasons natively over text, images and audio, and balances costs with performance through efficient and controllable thinking efforts. We trained it to be a broad balanced foundation model, strong across many domains, flexible enough to adapt. Inkling is not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed. Instead, a combination of qualities make it a good open weight space for customization, multimodal capabilities, efficient thinking, and availability on Tinker for fine tuning. Inkling is just the start, our first release in a model family we will continue to build on. We want to make customization accessible for more use cases, so Inkling is available for fine tuning on Tinker today.