Announcing Tinker
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
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AI InfrastructureFine-Tuning ModelsStartups
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Thinking Machines announces Tinker, a tool for fine-tuning open-source models, sparking discussion about its uniqueness, value, and the company's direction.
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Does this new company have some connection to that, such as some of the same people?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation
Which makes the hero image on this page being a diagram of Danny Hillis' TinkerToy computer all the more baffling.
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.
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.
Edit: I'm not changing my usage of the word. I like to tinker.
You believe the slur is used now more than 37 years ago or something?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Safire
[2] https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events...
however, "the islands of Great Britain" is offensive to the Irish
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
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. The etymologies I was seeing show it going from "this is a word that describes a job" and branching to "this group of people does this job a lot, let's call them this word" and "fiddling with things to do anything is close enough".
I'm genuinely interested in this, I work in what's a relatively "woke" domain (education) and I've never heard a complaint about something being called "tinkerable", even from colleagues in the UK.
The order of the senses is clear but different:
The "mender of kettles, pots, pans, etc.," sense come first.
The “gipsy” sense comes later an is derived from it.
The “repair or put into shape rudely or temporarily" - and later "work imperfectly, work in an experimental or meddlesome manner; keep busy in a useless way" - sense also comes from the first one.
[ Scottish Gypsies under the Stewarts; David MacRitchie; 1894 ]
You are going to great efforts to defend your use of a slur.
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."
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.
There's also rather significant modern use of "tinker": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_(disambiguation)
It appears that you're getting stuck on "tinkers", 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."
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.
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.
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.
> they're probably due for some self-reflection on what offends their sensibilities.
Or maybe what they're willing to accept?
https://www.reuters.com/technology/mira-muratis-ai-startup-t...
I wouldn't touch this until they get serious about having real assurances that they're not going to access customer data without a real, justifiable reason. If Amazon gave themselves free reign to read S3 data it would be outrageous, this is basically the same thing.
They've clearly called out that organizations can contact them for their specific needs..
PR and marketing will literally write anything they can get away with. Thanks for pointing out the TOS hole.
2. and more broadly: Has anyone got real lift in business metrics through fine-tuning an open model over using the flagship models from say OpenAI or Anthropic?
And I have gotten a real lift, in cost effectiveness and engagement (for creative writing)
Instead there are mechanical mistakes models make that harm engagement and are trivially verifiable (overused phrases and concepts, hitting a given target reading level, etc.)
Improving those is what improves engagement.
It would be great if they offered inference from the trained model as well. Ideally pay per token.
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.
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