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I don't hear about them a lot but it looks like arcee.ai is aiming to be just that.

Here are some of their current open weight offerings: https://www.arcee.ai/open-source-catalog

It could be but there are a host of companies going after open weights models: Arcee, Reflection, Llama (TBD on Meta's focus on closed-source versus open-source), etc.

That said, the fine-tuning API + open weight model at least is a semblance of a viable business that could work so I will be curious about it. I'm not sure the synergy is fully there (why is someone with an open weights model privelaged to fine-tune it better if it's just QLora or Lora) but let's see!

What is the business model for an open weight model?

Its not as good as GLM 5.2 for agentic workflows while also being bigger. Competition is going to be ruthless because the super low cost to switching.

There is also AllenAi in the US, but they have yet to produce a model at this scale. Thankfully, new contenders can come out of nowhere and do well, as long as they can produce a competitive model.

MiniMax M3 and DeepSeek v4-Pro are highly capable long context open weight multi-modal models. But long-context is a trap, because performance still falls dramatically after 150k-200k context.

It's nearly double the size of Nemotron 3 Ultra, so I'd expect it to be considerably better, although the active parameter count seems to be a touch lower at 41B vs 55B

Maybe the thesis is that

Open source low cost models will dominate most enterprise tasks as cost curves will dictate usage. TM is trying to replicate that especially as the US and China gets more defensive with their tech

For thinking machines, they provide super simple finetuning APIs.

if it is their model, they can have more lower level integrations for that. Thinking machines might be the only large lab in the US to have business interest aligned with open sourcing strong models that are customizable.

Just serving the model over API seems like a natural fit and is what many of them are doing. So simply being the cloud provider for your own open weight model can be a source of revenue

Similar to companies working on FOSS codebases, hosting (sometimes with the license restricting third-parties in some way), providing tailored models and services to customer's and getting bought for your team if your model happens to be competitive enough.

- inference

- RLaaS (Tinker, or the more involved FDE motion a la Reflection / Applied Compute)

They are one of the few labs (perhaps even the only one at this level) that are doing something both unique and useful, rather than simply imitating what the others are doing: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/

How does the radar plot prevent you from looking at just one of its axes?

They mention in the announcement link https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/ that they are still testing Inkling-Small and it will also still be multimodal. This makes it super interesting as a Deepseek V4 Flash replacement (and would be interesting with DwarfStar / ds4 if it gets supported).

> If it's ~30% bigger and not as good as GLM 5.2, why would I tinker with this model?

The benchmarks never tell the full story. Some of the open weights models have been benchmaxxed for a while. Their utility on real work can be different than the benchmark number.

The multimodal input is also a big deal. Having vision input is really helpful for a lot of tasks.

There's also an Inkling-Small that is 276B, 12B active that is much smaller than GLM 5.2 and still multimodal. Not released yet, but in the announcement link they mention that they're testing Inkling-Small & will release as open weight after testing. That one may be interesting as a Deepseek V4 Flash replacement.

If they have a really seamless fine-tuning experience and maybe can help you extract the data you need to FT (which is one of the big challenges in actually getting fine-tuning democratized), maybe you would use it because "Tinker" defaults to it.

The model could also be more flexible for non-coding use-cases (they show the results for reasoning being strong) so maybe the argument is to use it for non-coding use-cases to drive relatively deterministic conclusions for non-coding agents (they have also done some determinism work on kernels, which could be useful in pulling on that thread of deterministic models that are fine-tuned for everything that is not writing code.)

That said, I'm not sure how much all the work they have done actually synergizes or if the market size (at least in the short to medium term) is big enough for a huge outcome from the company's current valuation with those bets as the enterprise agent estate is taking a while to evolve. Hence companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are throwing tons of consulting money at the problem.

> Maybe for the multi modal?

Yeah

Moonshot (Kimi) has raised $3.77B and been around for >3 years, Thinking Machines raising $2B and releasing a decent open weights model in 16 months is actually quite comparable.

> ...while KIMI and DeepSeek will release Fable-class models this week.

What new model is DeepSeek releasing? Their current V4 Pro at Max reasoning is consistently worse than GLM 5.2 at Max reasoning, though the latter is close to Opus 4.8 at Extra/Max reasoning, albeit a little bit worse in my experience (though if they gave comparable amounts of tokens to Anthropic 5x Max subscription I could see myself moving over, currently they give you less though even with their ZCode discount).

In practical agentic development, none of those seem to be that close to Fable to me. Spent 181 million tokens with GLM 5.2 with ZCode in the past month, 142 million with DeepSeek V4 Pro with ZCode and OpenCode and about 3.45 billion across all Anthropic models with Claude Code, though understandably with my workload between 95-99% of them are cached (very docs/plan/tooling/read heavy work to limit slop, albeit with sub-agents and workflows).