Mira Murati, the 36-year-old tech prodigy who shot to fame at OpenAI (fortune.com)

Mira Murati’s startup Thinking Machines Lab has launched its first product, Tinker: a developer-focused platform that lets researchers fine-tune large language models without managing massive distributed compute stacks. Backed by a record-setting $2 billion seed round that valued the company at $12 billion, Tinker aims to simplify customization of frontier models by handling distributed training and infrastructure complexity behind a few lines of code. The platform currently supports fine-tuning for Meta’s Llama and Alibaba’s Qwen models and promises additional tooling and scientific releases to help the broader research community evaluate frontier systems. For the AI/ML community this matters because it shifts emphasis from only building ever-larger base models to democratizing access to model specialization and experimentation. By lowering the barrier to fine-tuning, Tinker could accelerate research, enable more domain-specific models, and change competitive dynamics that favor firms with massive infra budgets. Murati’s track record at OpenAI, the high-profile team she assembled from top labs, and the company’s ability to resist aggressive hiring raids from giants like Meta add credibility and signal a commitment to independence and responsible scaling. If Tinker delivers on distributed training automation and reproducible scientific outputs, it may become a pivotal tool for labs and startups that need customizable frontier capabilities without hyperscale resources.