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 investors are about to lose their shirts in this space.
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.
> If it looks like a bubble and smells like a bubble…
People have been saying this for the better part of 10 years
Investors are investing just as much in the person/team as what they are building. What they build will change, but having a good team is all the difference.
On the other hand, if for whatever reason some top tier soccer/football/basketball/etc. went to shark tank and said «I want to release my own sportswear brand», they’d probably get their funding. In fact, they’d probably have investors lined up.
Same thing here. Mira is a top tier, high-profile person in the AI space. So investors lined up.
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 of money, but it's not as if she has no track record.
It is a bubble, of course, but this person would get $100m round in a non-bubble.
By that logic it almost sounds as if Meg Whitman was highly qualified to run HP…
She was qualified.
Are you saying that her previous experience shouldn't have counted as a positive attribute for being hired?
It's a false signal
Shark Tank is semi-scripted entertainment. It's not representative of how venture capital works in the real world.
> The fundraise also saw participation from AI chip giant Nvidia
This is really obvious 'round-tripping' no? Nvidia invests in startups that are going to spend a majority of their funds on GPUs, Nvidia's revenue goes up, Nvidia's stock goes up, Nvidia makes more 'investments' in startups who use that investment to continue the cycle?
No different than investment banks in the US loaning money to ukraine so they can get patriot missiles. This generates two income streams for the US ( interest payments on the debt and money to RTX for the missiles). Trump gets a cut on both of these monies (tax on income).
This is why the Us is pro Israel as well. They are a good customer to the military industrial complex.
Now if we could only get japan, ASEAN, S.Korea into a conflict w China over taiwan we could ramp up this model - but we’ll need to build drone factories to usurp the the cheap turkish, polish, ukrainian, and russian suppliers.
And the additional bonus is that all this has to be transacted in dollars giving our currency preeminence so we can print more of them and not suffer inflation- even tho there are more dollars chasing the same goods- its happening symmetrically around the world because everyone has to use them.
I've been worried about the US abandoning Japan and this radically shifting the power centers in the world. But, the way you describe it sounds like I should not worry. At least, as long as I trust the weapons manufacturers to keep things stable so they can extract their new profit opportunities. I still feel a tinge of worry.
Sidenote: Nvidia has been caught round-tripping before, way back.
Looking at the valuation I don't get how they would not be round-tripping and otherwise cooking the books a lot right now (not necesarily limited to this case, but more in general).
Very strong Y2K bubble vibes.
To an extend, sure, but not in the "obvious" way you suggest, because that's very illegal. Any arrangement for Nvidia to obviously and directly fund startups to clearly funnel money back through purchases would quickly attract scrutiny from auditors, regulators, and co-investors.
Yes, though realistically they’d be buying the GPUs regardless of who the investors and this sort of vertical integration isn’t directly illegal
Yes, except they are monopolist, right? It's basically not optional choice.
The magnitudes make it s.t. it doesn't really matter, I think.
It's kinda sad that this is frontpage news, because there is nothing related to technology in the title, nothing intellectually interesting.
YC is first and foremost a startup accelerator so it makes sense that entrepreneurship would be part of the discussion that people here are interested in.
You are right! Just like how a certain contingent flags posts that discuss any appalling misuse of technology under the pretext that "oh, it's politics, etc.", you should do the same for these scammy news items: flag + hide.
I don't know that it'll work, but it is worth trying.
Andreessen Horowitz is not gambling with their own money:
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/andreessen-horowitz...
Moreover, if some banks will fail in the aftermath, they'll be bailed out at the expense of you know whom.
How do you think VC firms work? There is no "own money". Their entire business is getting rich people, institutional investors, governments, pension funds, endowments etc. to give them money and investing that money in startups, keeping a cut for themselves.
Why do you ask me? One of the top comments assumes that it would be crazy to assume recklessness on the part of a16z. I point out that they are insulated from the consequences on multiple levels.
Exactly the point they are making?
Gives a whole new meaning to the "2 on 12 seed round" !
This is so weird to me.
Yes, she was there at OpenAI and by all accounts a super respected non researcher.
Clearly she's incredible, her reputation proceeds her etc. but is operational strength (being a good exec) really what gets to AGI?
Feels almost like cargo-culting.
I suppose one should expect ‘time to agi’ to be a function of:
1. Researchers
2. Productivity-enhancing things in the org (either technical stuff like frameworks/optimisations or nebulous social things like better collaboration)
3. Amount of available compute.
4. Luck
And then the past experience with openAI should help a lot with doing a good job of #1 and #2 even if it is just being a competent executive.
IIRC, she was the driving force behind ChatGPT - the product, that is. Arguably the most successful AI/LLM product.
Maybe the product she’s pitched has massive commercial potential.
The ability to attract good researchers is probably more important than being one your self.
> Feels almost like cargo-culting.
Why almost?
Sorry: precedes
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 hostility.
True. People here can be like this. I have not forgotten even the greatest juice maker of all times, Juicero was similarly disparaged with all this negativity.
Ah yes, they were simply ahead of their time.
Yes. VCs invested money. It ended up a flop. And this hurts us... how exactly? Other than some VCs losing their money on a bad bet, who cares?
Well a lot of people on this forum are founders or early employees in startups. Every dollar vcs set on fire chasing some obviously stupid idea, waste on crypto memecoins, etc is a dollar that is not helping some legitimate startup get funded.
Yes, but when you put it as "why are you investing in these bad ideas? Invest in mine, it's obviously much better", it sounds a lot more self-interested (and far more likely to be wrong).
Often I think if the money could not be used for some better purpose. It is still huge resources wasted. Like digging and filling same trench. Overall it is not efficient use of resources or time to me.
But maybe there is some gain that I can't just imagine...
You can say the same about most science research. In fact, many people do say the same, scrutinizing many different avenues of research as pointless. There are countless examples of "pointless" research ending up being useful.
(Note that it's much more legitimate to scrutinize scientific research, since it's mostly publicly funded, as opposed to VCs investing in startups.)
> Overall it is not efficient use of resources or time to me.
I mean, the tech world has done a lot of good and advanced humanity a lot. More than most industries, IMO. Most of that is by inventing new things. A society could dial down useless spending by dialing down innovation, but it's not clear to me that there's a way to get more innovation with less waste than the current system.
I think many industries are far more of an "inefficient use of resources". I think if the world as a whole would spend 10x more on scientific and technological advancement, at the cost of less e.g. fashion, less investment in entertainment, less investment in (some forms of) finance, etc, the world would be far better off. (I'm not advocating that this should be forced on society, just stating my opinion on what a more optimal way of allocating resources would be.)
These people somehow imagine that they (as taxpayers perhaps) are going to pay the cost one way or another. Not to mention there's a tinge of jealousy over the level of VC money involved - they imagine these people do not "deserve" it.
It's a bad look on the entire industry. We send billions to serial grifters selling vaporware while the backbone of the internet is basically powered by $5 donations
It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
> It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
Why does it represent a "sorry state of affairs"?
VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk. Do we really prefer a world in which we don't take risks to develop new technology?
The VC sector is probably an order of magnitude smaller then, say, fashion. Isn't money better spent taking risks to develop new technologies that have a chance to legitimately change the world for the better?
Note: If you think the technology could be a negative (which, to some extent I do because of the elements of AI safety, that's a separate argument. Not sure that that's what you're referring to though.)
They use our pension funds for this. They also distort the market.
I do see some value in it, we need to take risks with our capital and on a long term horizon it's fine.
But there has to be some rationale behind it at least, some evidence based approach.
They don't "use" pension funds, pension funds can choose to invest in VCs if they decide to do so. I think most usually invest low single digits of investment in VCs, mostly as diversification.
Absolutely.
But I imagine there's immense pressure to do so. Returns are tracked relative to others. All distorted by big jumps in valuations. In the long term, there might be a more prudent/sustainable use of some of that capital but we'll never know, everyone's chasing share price go up, not value added / profit go up.
Yes, it's good to have your finger in the pie. But the stake may be overpriced, given current behaviour.
VCs, who go on and on about capitalism, were whining on Twitter until the Silicon Valley Bank got bailed out. In real capitalism the SVB would have been allowed to fail and the VCs would have taken a hit.
But no risk for them, everyone paid for them to keep their billions.
> Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread?
I think it lies at the intersection of a lot of topics where HN comments are hostile: VCs, large fundraising, AI, OpenAI related employees. These are all topics where HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic.
Most of the hostility is just a proxy for “VCs bad” banter.
> HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic
In the case of a bubble, hostility is pragmatism.
Of course, nobody knows that it's a bubble, but nobody knows it's not a bubble either.
I've lived through 3 and read up on at least 10 more.
Many people know it's a bubble. You see lots of HN comments that it's a bubble. We certainly did in 2007.
In a bubble, the predominant notion is not "I wonder if it's a bubble", but rather "It's a bubble, I hope I can make my money before it pops". A perfect example of this was the Tulip craze in the Netherlands. Nobody actually believed tulip bulbs were worth that much, they just wanted to find a bigger sucker to make a profit, if you read accounts from the time.
What is the false positive rate? Broken clock...
Bears predicted 11 of the last 3 recessions or something.
This. Ans that's why we even manage to reproduce bubbles in a very simple simulated environnement among finance students who know exactly how overvaluated their assets are (I can't find the paper right now though…)
The math to justify that investment is crazy.
This place used to be a place for hackers and founders. Now it is mostly a place for middle aged software engineers who hate someone else to success, change and hope for the future of Linux desktop. Thinking Machines presents both change and success .
My negativity for Thinking Machines is precisely because others (such as yourself) already consider it a success.
I don't think anyone can consider it a success just yet. But someone just injected 2 billion dollars into the enterprise. They are probably given a lot more information than you and I are. Maybe those people are dead wrong and they lose all their money, but maybe not.
With the public information there is neither a point in positivity not negativity. It would be speculation either way. A question that could be worth pondering is what exactly the investors are shown? What would you need to see to put all your money in thinking machines?
Thinking Machines represent the new elite. People with the right pedigree that can raise billions with only an idea. If they fail, they’ll get paid anyway - and they’ll become billionaires.
It is a position that is completely unreachable for 99.9999% of people even in tech.
It is of course easy to write off critics as jealous has-beens and bozos.
People with no product, no specific insight, and no published plan raising $$ trillions, due to elite background.
(Sure -- that background is somewhat self earned.)
I think most people aren’t aware that as CTO Murati can take a large chunk of the credit for OpenAI’s success. Her skills were mostly in deft technical management, a skill often under appreciated by nerds. Her success here is going to heavily depend on her ability to attract the right talent.
Where is all the hate for SSI?
I don't know much about them, but how they decided to call themselves strikes me as ... unwise: https://bookanalysis.com/dune/thinking-machines/
(They could have just as well picked Skynet.)
Pretty sure it's a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation, the famous supercomputer company from the 80s-90s where Richard Feynman briefly worked.
I have a pretty dim view of VCS, or at least a16z, after seeing some of the awful blockchain tech startups they were throwing money at during the last bubble
My opinion: AI is taking all the money that could be spent on cool advancements that could give the average person hope and putting it towards a pipe dream. Why not be hostile towards the perceived death of an industry you love?
The whole system has gone crazy because of the wealthy having so much that the current game of coming up with stupid stories (AGI, Self Driving Cars, Robots that can do your household chores, Crypto) to convince people that a company can be worth 50-100 times earnings or valueless internet points will go up in price forever! There is no way these companies can possibly meet these expectations but the money sloshing around in the system makes it possible for rich people to keep believing (religiously) as there are no investments actually left for them to earn real money from a population that increasingly has nothing and earns less and less of the pie while valueless investments skyrocket.
I'd much rather this than the 2010s of Uber for X or the 10,000th SaaS productivity app.
Because it looks like VC are spendings ridicoulous amounts of money for hype while many startups with actual products and a product market fit struggle to attract investors because their product is not related to transformers.
It makes perfect sense... Why spend time and money on building a product in hope of attracting VCs that may like it? Instead present your idea in an intentionally vague way that makes everyone's imagination fill in the blanks in the most favorable way.
They were founded 6 months ago, have no product, yet are purported to be worth $12B? I mean ... Come on.
Mistral having a $113M seed round from a slide deck
Murati: “hold my beer”.
> but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building
you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true. VC funds get money from complicated funnel likely including my/your retirement account and country public debt, VC managers likely receive bonuses for closed deals and not long term gains which may materialize in 10 years. So, investing 2B into non-existing product with unclear market fit/team/tech moat smells very strongly.
> you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true.
Correct. Most VCs are using someone else's money. See Softbank. And making extremely poor judgements on how to use that money.
Unfortunately in many cases those "other people" are, for instance, California's teachers.
> they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building
"Presumably" they have "some" idea. Oh really? Are you "sure" about that? Is that a $12B type confidence?
Well, I'm fairly confident they at least have the concept of an idea.
> Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines
> significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself.
because ppl on this website don't consider her a 'talent'.
I don't think that's fair. The company was founded around 6 months ago and already has a valuation of 12B even though barely anyone outside of AI has heard of them, and I bet almost nobody even here could name their product. It's not that people think she's untalented, but rather, she'd have to be superhuman to justify that by herself.
No one needs another mistral
huh, what happened? I haven't been following Mistral but I recall it was everyone's up and coming darling, no?
It's about to be bought by Apple, so not for long.
I thought that was perplexity.
There's quite a gap between “Apple considers buying Mistral” and “they are about to be bought by Apple”.
I'll take another ten Mistrals thank you.
Remind me, does she have plans to release an actual product? Or is this like Ilya's company where their first and only product will be AGI, if/when that ever happens?
I think it takes a lot of temerity and hubris to look at a 2B raise and assume it's all hype. A16Z has certainly had some misses, but one assumes there actually is some product they're showing behind closed doors that makes this round much more reasonable than it appears from the outside.
If something makes no sense, seems totally crazy, and is being done by a crowd of extremely smart people, you can only assume one of two things: they are actually crazy and frittering away 2B on hype or, just maybe, there's something we're not aware of. If there are only two camps: optimistic and naive or pessimistic and dismissive, I'll choose naive every day of the week.
Anyways, congrats to Thinking Machines and here's hoping they do have something awesome up their sleeve!
Theranos was worth $9B in 2013 money, and it latet turned out that they had literally nothing but hype. Enron was posting $100B revenue the year before it went bankrupt. Bernie Madoff's fund had huge banks as institutional investors. Magic Leap was valued at $4.6B and had some purportedly amazing demos behind closed doors that anyone who witnessed them thought would revolutionize entertainment.
While these are not necessarily typical cases, they show that it's absolutely possible to have gigantic valuations raised from industry experts with nothing to show for it, if you're good enough at lying.
The weird thing about Theranos is that every single expert who knew about the technical details of blood testing basically called out the BS from the get go.
Blood testing for a single condition can involve blood separation via centrifuges, application of various chemical solutions, a multi-step process using varios test strips (each with different specificities/sensitivities). Not to mention some of the offending markers might be so rare in blood that you'd have to draw multiple vials just to get a statistically significant amount of markers.
Reducing just a single one of these tests to an instant test that works with a drop of blood would be a major breakthrough, subject to various medical awards (and lengthy medical trials).
Theranos famously didn't manage to raise VC money, the funding all came from people like Rupert Murdoch and the Walton family.
> a crowd of extremely smart people
I don't disagree with your broader point, but have spent enough time with enough a16z partners to say they're just people. Not outright stupid, but not extremely smart, either. And their error rate is pretty high.
Which...to some extent is by design. It's part of a VC's job to make bad bets. Sometimes the price of getting into a deal at all is getting in on insane terms, but you still do it because that one investment could return the entire fund. Maybe Thinking Machines is a winner, maybe it's another Clubhouse. We'll see.
I do agree for $2bn, but it’s also well known that US and in particular SV VCs will fund ideas and people, I.e. potential, whereas everywhere else funds results.
It’s that culture that creates some spectacular hits, and a vast number of misses. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a different approach and means that the funding doesn’t necessarily suggest the results one might expect.
> they are actually crazy and frittering away 2B on hype
This assumes that being careless with billions can only ever be crazy.
If you're already set for life, why not gamble (including at completely irrational levels) for even more insane amounts of money when the whole thing is just a crazy house of mirrors. Yes, there's value at the heart, but there's also crazy amounts of money being funneled in, lots of opportunity for chaos, lots of chances for legal rug pulls. All of it inflated even further by a fervor of carelessness for any kind of consequences - things like the stock market are completely removed from any kind of fundamentals.
In a fun house of mirrors, that 2 billion could be 2 cents, or it could be 2 trillion. Buy the ticket and have fun!
> A16Z has certainly had some misses, but one assumes there actually is some product
They don’t need to show a product. It’s been demonstrated that with capital and some skill you can train a foundation model. A16Z has the former. Murati has the latter.
Isn’t this the perspective that leads to all bubbles?
What kind of temerity and hubris would it take to believe that the ratings agencies were colluding with the banks to give AAA to Mortgage Backer Securities?
> one assumes there actually is some product they're showing
Can it simply be that anyone who wants to create new competitive models at this point needs billions for training? This isn't a saas where you can whip up a prototype in a month. Rather than having a product to show, I'd guess it's more about an experienced team and some plausible-sounding research ideas.
> A16Z has certainly had some misses,..
Yeah, similar to Trump administration may have had some misses but extremely smart people are doing great things.
Oh it’s going to get exciting indeed!
Could be, or it could be a simple flawed net present value calculation, similar to Effective Altruism.
SBF said if he had a die and it had a 99% chance of killing everyone and a 1% chance of making the world 1 million times happier he would roll the die. Repeatedly. And Silicon Valley loved him.
I think AI is a similar calculation. Humans are tearing themselves apart and the only thing worth betting on is AI that can improve itself, self replicate and end scarcity. I believe that these VCs believe that AI is the only chance to save humanity.
And if you believe that, the net present value of AGI is basically infinite.
> Humans are tearing themselves apart and the only thing worth betting on is AI that can [...] end scarcity
Scarcity, wow...
- There is no scarcity in the rich world by historical standards.
- There is extreme poverty in large parts of the world, no amount of human intelligence has fixed this and therefore no amount of AI will. It is primarily not a question of intelligence.
- On top of that "ending scarcity" is impossible due to the hedonistic treadmill and the way the human mind works as well as the fact that with or without AI there will still be disease, aging and death.
I think they act as if making these bets is the only way to save themselves. None of them care about humanity obviously.
I think they care about the nebulous concept “humanity” as represented by themselves “the light of consciousness”. Humans? Not so much.
Well in that end game of a post scarcity is there a need for humans?
If you were in the top 1% and you don’t need labor anymore because it can be automated.
Even in post scarcity some people will want as much as possible for themselves, if history is any baseline.
I guess investors are hoping for another Anthropic, or resurrection of Richard Feynman to help with development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation for the reference
Danny Hillis deserves a mention
Absolutely, moreso than Feynman in this context. But, Danny Hills doesn't make a good sound bite.
Looks like a bubble, pops like a bubble.
Wouldn't overlook this company, they manage to bring over a good deal of top talent from OpenAI including John Schulman
Does anybody know what they are building yet?
"it wants to build artificial intelligence systems that are safer, more reliable and aimed at a broader number of applications than rivals".
If only I had had that idea, maybe I could have raised $2B.
And the credentials of running if you also had the credentials of being a very successful CTO at OpenAI, you might have.
They need to build a Terminator T-800 as the ultimate AI safety and a Time Machine.
I am working on a pitch deck for a startup that is going to build language models that aren't just safe and reliable but they are actually CONSCIOUS.
consciousmachines.ai
Such an obvious next step. Conscious, ethical, inclusive machines.
"I have an idea for a startup. it's like AI but BETTER. Wouldn't you like better AI? Money please!"
I heard they are building a What the hell were you thinking machine.
A a supercomputer with 65536 processors and a 16 dimensional hypercube interconnect, in a black monolithic enclosure with red blinkenlights.
Yeah, but no Richard Feynman this time around. And I was just wearing this shirt today! https://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/cm-tshirt.html
Gavin Belson Signature Edition Box 1
why are you giving away the joke
More of the same it seems. How can you deliver a product within 2 months of there is anything novel.
> How can you deliver a product within 2 months of there is anything novel
Uh, run the training script with your thoughtful modifications? They’re not welding together an LLM.
hype
This is what I expect. Theyre Not hiring even engineers. By the time they have a strategy, plan, hire, and act on that plan they will be behind the curve, and force to use the $ to acquire someone who did.
Well this is blatantly false, she linked the career page and I know of people that received offers recently.
They have very strong talent from Meta's FAIR/Pytorch teams as well as a lot of strong people from OAI.
This is wrong. they have strong engineering and a product coming this year
While you are seeing in to the future, can you tell me the Powerball numbers?
the product is announced and their hires are public
foundational models
It is literally in the article:
> "We're excited that in the next couple months we will be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom model," CEO Murati said in a post on the X social media platform.
Is there a word (like aphorism or metaphor) for someone trying to prove a point and doing the opposite? There just has to be.
"You've just proved my point" is enough.
What are they building?
they have concepts of a product
A big, beautiful... thing.
What are they going to spend those $2B on?
Buying Windsurf, presumably.
SUCH a good comment - made me laugh
At this point, arms-crossed mugshot of "{ex-Open AI} raises $2B" is a meme. Training one epoch of a model the size of the GPT-4 family is easily an 8 figure job. Considering other ops costs, UI and backend dev, securing Everest sized datasets, demos/talks, wages, bonuses etc, this probably gives them around 100 trial and errors, or in other words "Look at me mum, I won 100 chips for the casino!"
And imagine being the ops guy there, about to run a new training batch, but you specified the wrong input path. Puff, the money is gone. Absolutely wild stuff.
Murati was CTO. Whilst Brockman and Altman may have bypassed or undermined her on some occasions, she can take large credit for OpenAI’s technical success. Brockman can take credit for his extremely hard work, increasing cadence. Altman for incredible fundraising and (often polarising) visionary leadership.
From what I’ve read, Murati was an excellent CTO.
Well, if you have to pay $200 million to a top AI engineer, $2B is a very short runway for a startup.
a16z is the new softbank when it comes to signaling short or run
Some of the best OpenAI people work at TM. Wish them all the best.
VCs are betting they'll get out with at least some gains before this bubble bursts. They have literally nothing new, not even in theory. They'll build a smaller-but-not-that-small-still-better-than-you-expect model which will be kind of open for others, which means they'll cut some deal and pretend they did something and that they received something in return.
> They have literally nothing new, not even in theory
They haven’t built anything yet. It’s a bit premature to call out the non-existing product as insufficiently novel.
>It’s a bit premature to call out the non-existing product as insufficiently novel.
I think the point is that the pie-in-the-sky promises are insufficiently novel.
> point is that the pie-in-the-sky promises are insufficiently novel
You have no data to judge novelty on. If you think AI rocket science, they’re flubs. If you don’t, they have a shot. Either way, I can’t see novelty being unsatisfied.
Who is this person and why is she attempting to skinwalk the name of a really cool computer company (creators of the Connection Machine)?
Ex-CTO of OpenAI
After what we have seen in terms of talent acquisition this seems like a no-brainer really.
I do hope they have some novel idea up their sleeve. Another firm just executing a similar playbook even if well executed is not going to face headwinds against incumbents
You can buy six B-2 bombers for that money. And use them against competitor AI startups. You think this sounds stupid? This is where all this AI arms race is going.
I am willing to sell my killthe.ai domain for the highest bider :D
Now that I would invest in.
That's what a B2B business is?
How many nukes? Will carpeting Silicon Valley unlock the value?
How about defense systems?
Maybe they can make a T-800 to ensure when AI/skynet goes rogue humanity has a chance.
It’s the ultimate AI safety.
“I’ll be back”
I need to get around to betting against this on prediction markets soon.
> "We're excited that in the next couple months we will be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom model," CEO Murati said in a post, opens new tab on the X social media platform.
We need to jack up interest rates again.
hahaha
So novel, they couldn't even come up with an original name.
To be fair the other Thinking Machines has been defunct over 30 years.
That said, what was left of the old one was bought by Sun, which is now owned by Oracle.
I wonder if they still own rights to the name? Not the wisest move to name your new company after something owned by the most famously litigious tech corporation.
Yet the Jurassic Park franchise is just as strong as ever.
Thinking Machines CM-5 in Jurassic Park (1993):
https://www.starringthecomputer.com/appearance.html?f=11&c=1...
Jurassic World Rebirth passes $500 M in revenue:
https://www.koimoi.com/box-office/jurassic-world-rebirth-wor...
Fun fact, in the novel the computers were Cray X-MPs (sadly Cray is now semi-defunct, since they were bought and merged into HPE) [1].
[1] https://cray-history.net/2023/08/20/cray-systems-in-popular-...
Thinking Machines was chosen over the Cray because they had more visual appeal. Sheryl Handler the CEO had (has) a real flair for and it showed; they were neat looking machines
The Cray machines looked more like an airport seating area. Or with later models, obstacles in a laser tag arena. While the Thinking Machines with the moving LEDs looked alive, almost like it was designed to be a character in a movie, which they became.
Maybe the new company should consider something like this for the next investor show and tell
what? Cray machines were pretty rad looking in their own way.
They were, but they didn't blink.
Fascinating question! I can't find any mention of this seemingly obvious issue.
Here's[1][2] their trademark application from February, which is still "NOT ASSIGNED". Technically it's for their logotype but I imagine it's all the same issue, considering that they include "Computer hardware" in the description of their company (which is exactly what the old one did). This site ominously says that the only action since the filing date was on June 5th, titled "LETTER OF PROTEST EVIDENCE FORWARDED" -- perhaps that's Oracle?
I think this[4] is the trademark for the original's ("Thinking Machines Corporation") trademark logotype, first used in 1987 and defunct ("cancelled"?) by 1999. Another site[5] lists three other "Dead/Cancelled" trademarks owned by the original, and two more recent attempts by randos in 2006 and 2010 that were both shot down.
Technically they're "Thinking Machine Lab Inc."[3], but they're basically always referred to without the "Lab", even to the point of using thinkingmachines.ai as their domain (which, hilariously, doesn't use their trademarked logotype). Another goofy tidbit is that they also filed a trademark for a serif logotype of the words "BEEP BOOP"[6] -- maybe that's their fallback name!
Would be fascinated to hear from anyone familiar with US trademark law on what might be going on, and how we might see what the "LETTER OF PROTEST" is! My layperson understanding would definitely tell me that Oracle would maintain the trademarks, but perhaps they were forced to let them lapse due to lack of use?
I've been slowly building (y'know how it is...) a (one-man...) company filed as "Doering Thinking Machines, LLC" for a few years (named after an old family business, "Doering Machines"), so I'm quite interested to see how this shakes out!
[1] https://furm.com/trademarks/thinking-machines-99054776
[2] For the love of god, please HN gods, just make these comments markdown. IDK what battle you're fighting but it's a baffling one. The lack of blockquotes is painful, but the lack of inline links is downright diabolical! You have three people now, you can afford the effort ;)
[3] https://trademarks.justia.com/741/37/thinking-machines-74137...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Lab
I really hope these seemingly experienced entrepreneurs got the trademark sorted out and locked down before adopting it. Otherwise it may be an expensive lesson.
IANAL but I do know trademarking a logotype is a kind of 'trade dress' that's not the same trademarking the words of the name (even if those words appear\ in the logotype).
One would imagine they already thought of that. There are at least two people at a16z old enough to know about the original TM.
I guess "random and pleasing" is appropriate for both CM-5s and LLMs.
Maybe it's a throwback fashion statement.
Bet they've never heard of it
2bn from 16az, post-artificial paradigm auto-correct. this is a market exodus for parting the red sea.
This company calls for a Butlerian Jihad. I mean, in all seriousness: calling themselves like the original evil in Dune with at least a likelihood that a evil general intelligence is showing up soon is very disturbing.