Miriam Marathi has just raised $2 billion for her AI startup thinking machine labs or is everyone on Twitter is calling it thinky. We'll see if that name actually sticks. But this is really impressive. They've revealed a little bit about what they're actually going to be doing with the money, who they got the money from.
We're going to break all of that down in the podcast today. This is a huge deal. This is one of the top funded AI startups at this point with this new $2 billion and it has a $12 billion valuation before ever launching a product. So this is really quite impressive.
She went on Twitter recently and was tweeting about this. We're going to dive into all of that before we do. I wanted to mention if you ever wanted to try out the latest AI models I talked about on the podcast here, there's new ones coming out every single weekend, sometimes every day. I'd love for you to go check out AI box.ai.
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AI box.ai. There is a link in the description. All right. Let's get into what Miriamarati is doing.
So what's interesting here, Miriamarati, of course, is famous for coming from opening eyes. She's one of the founding team members. Now those founding team members have this definitely kind of this golden aura about them where they're able to go spin out of opening eye. We've had a lot of them leave opening eye and go spin up their own companies and raise huge amounts of money.
And Miriamarati, she is a very serious player. She was the interim CEO for, I think, one or two days opening eyes. So she's got a great track record and she was actually in charge. I believe she was the CTO at one point.
She was in charge of a lot of most impressive products that came out of open eye, including, I believe, their image generator. So what's interesting here, she's she's been out this whole new thing and it's been very secret. If you go to the website, there is very little information that has that you've essentially been able to find on there, but she talked to Twitter and gave us a little bit of an insight with this new round of funding. This is what she said.
She said, quote, thinking machine lab exists to empower humanity through advancing collaborative general intelligence. We're building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world through conversation, through site, through the messy way we collaborate. We're excited that in the next couple of months, we'll be able to share our first product. Oh, yeah.
I just got to stop there for a second. At first, the description of like advancing collaborative general intelligence, like no one knows what the heck that means, but I think that like for their investors, never announced it's like the signal and that's probably what they're raising the money for. They said multimodal AI models, right? So we're probably talking like it sounds like definitely they have an audio model, definitely they have a text generation model, the $2 billion they're definitely going to be able to train some impressive models and we know they have a partnership with Google that they made Google Cloud in the past to do a lot of this.
So they have partners in place, they have the money, they're going to be training their own models. And I'd be curious to see if this also gets into video and image generation model just based off of her background. But regardless, I think the keyword here, the reason that she's making money in the way she's differentiating herself is the word collaborative, right? She literally puts this in the title, advancing collaborative general intelligence.
What the heck is collaborative? And then later on, she said that she says through the messy way we collaborate. So I think there's going to be a tool that's probably for teams, probably for enterprise or maybe for regular users too, but it's going to have a collaborative feature. So you're using it, someone else can use it, you share a link and you're all messaging inside of the same thread, which is honestly a very cool idea.
This then the cool thing is they're actually getting ready to release a product. Now, this is usually tied to these fundraising rounds. I just raised $2 billion. I don't think they get to raise that $2 billion after I believe they already raised a billion.
And I don't think they'd be able to like, Hey, raise a billion. Now we want to raise another $2 billion for something cool, which we don't really know what it is. They've obviously developed their product and they said that they're actually going to be releasing that soon, which is probably why they got the funding. They probably showed a demo to the investors.
So they said it works cited in the next couple of months, we'll be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models. So this is cool. It seems like they're taking a unique angle. It's going to be open source, whatever their tool is, and it's going to be for startups that are building their own custom models to be able to use their tools to better do this.
She said soon we'll also share our best science to help the research community, better understand frontier AI system. So it sounds like they have some breakthroughs and discoveries that also be able to share, which is always exciting in addition to the open source tools that they can give the research behind how they actually made those tools are sometimes even more important. You know, we've seen companies like opening eye or others like release a model and they'll release the weights, but no one really knows how they got that model. And so it's a little bit murky.
And so it's cool when we actually get the science behind it. They talk, she talked a little bit about who they raised money from, which was A16Z who actually led this. So the number one adventure capital company in America is leading this. They have participation from NVIDIA who always just puts in money for any new AI startup that looks serious because they know they're going to have to buy NVIDIA GPUs.
So it's kind of like buying their own book or whatever. But I mean, great play by NVIDIA. No hate there. As sell, another top VC service now, Cisco, AMD, Jane Street and a bunch of others.
She said, we're always looking for extraordinary talent. And then she pretty much has like a call out to, you know, if anyone wants to go work at a company, it's kind of interesting when you see these like big announcement. They're like, here's a big announcement. Here's how much we raise.
Here's kind of what we're doing. If anyone wants to work with us, let us know, right? It's kind of like always a recruiting thing too. Dylan Patel said, please honor the nickname everyone uses.
Thinky. Someone has a picture of or someone said, due to inflation, $1 million seed rounds are now $1 billion. And someone said, when API key, someone said, looking forward to thinkies first product. All right.
Well, it sounds like it's thinking that's the name of the company going forward. But overall, really exciting. And they have, you know, obviously the top VCs are putting billions of dollars into it. I don't think this is vaporware.
I think they have a serious product that they're getting ready to release, which is really exciting. And of course, with her background, we know that this is going to be something that is pretty exciting. But this is kind of crazy because we're seeing these larger and larger seed rounds. This is, I think, one of the biggest seed rounds that we've ever seen in Silicon Valley, a billion or $2 billion for their seed round.
We had just in June, a couple of different news outlets were saying that they were getting close to raising $2 billion with a $10 billion valuation, but now it's up to $12 billion. So the valuation evidently has gone up, which I think is really interesting. We're not 100% sure if it's going to be an open source model that they're releasing. They're kind of alluded to this sort of open tool.
And so like, what we know that it's cool when these amars are completely open source, but we also know that some people are sort of sneaky, like Alameda, when they released their open model, but it wasn't open source, like a lot of people just say open model where basically they release a model that anyone can download and use. So it's like open sort of, but they don't always like share all of the weights or they don't always give people license. They're like, yeah, it's like open, but if you want to use it for anything commercially, you can't. And so then it's like, well, other than running a model on your computer by yourself, it's not super useful to actually build anything with.
So we don't know what exactly that's going to look like as far as it's going to be completely open source or not. But since Miria started this whole company, she has a really incredible team that she's been able to pull together a bunch of former OpenAI colleagues that she had. I have joined her. We have John Schulman, Brett Zof, Luke Metz.
And so we know right now she's really trying to staff up and get a bunch of people, she specifically says she's looking for people that have quote that are quote, building successful AI driven products from the ground up. That's what their website says. And we also know that this isn't the only way that people have that they have tried to get money. They actually have an offer allegedly from Meta to acquire the entire company.
That never, according to insiders, I never actually went to an offer that Meta made. But we know right at this point, Meta is offering these $100 million deals to a whole bunch of researchers. She has a ton of the top researchers that are companies. So I think Meta would love to acquire them, probably the tech they have would be super cool.
Meta is trying to build out their kind of their general super intelligence team. So it's going to be interesting to see to see what she's making. Some people are saying based off of the team they have and the amount of money that she's actually been able to raise. This is, you know, it's a quote unquote legitimate threat to leading AI models, as what TechCrunch says, like opening an eye and dropping deep mind.
I don't know. I mean, I would love for their new more competition in the field. I'm not going to I'm not going to say before seeing any sort of product or any sort of deliverable what with the competition rate is. I think everyone has been shocked by a company like, for example, XAI that was able to come up with Grock and built, you know, data centers and AI tools very quickly.
And, you know, their latest benchmarks had it as the number one AI model. So, and then they launched like within a year. So I think it's possible to do to leapfrog the entire industry in like one specific domain, right? Grock did it with just kind of text and PhD research responses.
It's not the best, does anything video or very the best audio or anything really great for image. So I think we're going to see more and more in the future. What this company is able to do. And if thinking lab thinking machine labs is able to come up with something impressive after being out for just a year, I think it'd be cool to see other people make the same play.
I think we'll see more VCs back these companies. Now, of course, it's not like Miriamarati came out of the blue. She's obviously one of the top brass at opening eye, the co-founder. So that's why she's able to get, I think the resources team and builds on this aggressive.
So it'd be interesting to see if anyone can replicate that. But in any case, this is absolutely, um, it's going to be an incredible uphill battle to watch as she brings her company to the forefront and competes potentially head on with a lot of the other big players, her former colleague, Sam Altman, uh, works, I just see what happens on TV up today on all of that. And whenever her model launches, if it has, you know, the ability to have API access, we will be posting this onto AI box, my own platform. So if you want to check out the platform and get all the models we currently have and all the future ones will be adding as their release, go check out AI box.ai as always.
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