Absolutely unacceptable that their TOS basically gives them unrestricted access to your datasets, as far as I read it. The terms let them use your datasets for pretty much whatever they decide they want to do with it (though they do say they would anonymize the data, which isn't especially helpful). The TOS leaves a lot of wiggle room for them to do pretty much whatever they want to the data.
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.
Your datasets are some of your most valuable assets. How is it entitled to not want your vendor having a free for all with them? It would be entitled if they weren't going to be charging for it.
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.
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.
The thing about this that’s interesting to me is that it can be used as a foundation for products they or other people make that combine real time RL rewards and fine tuning to improve the model. I see a lot of potential here compared to the standard paradigm of ChatGPT wrappers that involve tweaking the prompt or harness to improve it, which is a lot more constrained.
1. Can someone help me articulate what Tinker can do that Vertex AI or many others can't? (I can see access to some primitives, which is nice)
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?
Most managed finetuning offerings take your dataset, some hyperparameters, and spit out a model. Few support RL, and those that do have very limited support.
And I have gotten a real lift, in cost effectiveness and engagement (for creative writing)
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.
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.
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.
Usually we want an announcement to come with more than a waitlist before doing a frontpage thread on HN, but I guess this company is high-profile enough that the post is relevant anyway?
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?
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."
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Absolutely unacceptable that their TOS basically gives them unrestricted access to your datasets, as far as I read it. The terms let them use your datasets for pretty much whatever they decide they want to do with it (though they do say they would anonymize the data, which isn't especially helpful). The TOS leaves a lot of wiggle room for them to do pretty much whatever they want to the data.
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.
>Absolutely unacceptable Entitled much!? hold on to you pants.
They've clearly called out that organizations can contact them for their specific needs..
Your datasets are some of your most valuable assets. How is it entitled to not want your vendor having a free for all with them? It would be entitled if they weren't going to be charging for it.
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.
Silly question: how is it different from, say, hf's transformers and similar libraries and APIs?
with hf transformers, you still need to manage GPUs
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.
The thing about this that’s interesting to me is that it can be used as a foundation for products they or other people make that combine real time RL rewards and fine tuning to improve the model. I see a lot of potential here compared to the standard paradigm of ChatGPT wrappers that involve tweaking the prompt or harness to improve it, which is a lot more constrained.
OpenAI has had a fine-tuning API since GPT-3.5, and a reinforcement fine-tuning API since last year.
1. Can someone help me articulate what Tinker can do that Vertex AI or many others can't? (I can see access to some primitives, which is nice)
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?
Most managed finetuning offerings take your dataset, some hyperparameters, and spit out a model. Few support RL, and those that do have very limited support.
And I have gotten a real lift, in cost effectiveness and engagement (for creative writing)
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.
> 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.
Given that Thinking Machines has employed so many smart scientists, focusing solely on infra and fine-tuning is kind of a letdown.
I feel like this is what the current team excelled at at OpenAI, only makes sense that they would productize it
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.
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.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-09-29/the...
Their lack of a public product has been widely discussed for at least a month now
Isn't this a feature offered by many LLM providers? What's your USP here?
It is? Which ones give you distributed post training of MoE LLMs?
Usually we want an announcement to come with more than a waitlist before doing a frontpage thread on HN, but I guess this company is high-profile enough that the post is relevant anyway?
A/B testing the python scripts
The name chosen is an antiquated ethnic slur in much of the Anglosphere.
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?
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."
> 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.
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 "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."
Tinker was a Traveller slur long before the verb - denying that is just wilful ignorance itself. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tinker
let's not sanction being niggardly when mooting intent
> 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.
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.
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.
your usage is fine there too.
however, "the islands of Great Britain" is offensive to the Irish
Don't I know it. My Irish grandmother hated the British, but Northern Ireland is currently British - for now.
I suspect you're just not aware of how others consider the way you choose to speak: https://archive.is/WydpC
Interesting that you link to an article that has no issues with the word “tinker”.
Yes, it is, and 37 years later, it is no longer acceptable to use such terms.
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...
Interesting, Robert Jordan basically directly lifts that term for the Romani-esque tinkers in Wheel of Time.
The ethnic slur predates (and is the etymology of) the meaning you're familiar with.
Meanings become obsolete. Calling someone "nice" used to mean they were stupid.
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.
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
> 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.
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?
The colloquial meaning carries all of that baggage. You just weren't aware.
> 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.
How much of the Anglosphere?
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.
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?
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.