The strategy OpenAI cannot copy

Mira Murati may be making one of the smartest strategic bets in AI. Instead of trying to beat OpenAI and Anthropic by building the world’s most powerful model, Thinking Machines Lab is targeting the layer where companies customize and control their intelligence. Its open-weight model, Inkling, is the starting point. But Tinker is the real business: infrastructure that lets companies fine-tune open models on proprietary data and download the resulting weights. The thesis is that AI models are becoming cheaper and increasingly interchangeable. If that happens, the largest opportunity moves toward post-training, proprietary data, evaluation, and deployment. Thinking Machines has already demonstrated the potential with Bridgewater. A customized open model achieved 84.7% accuracy across six financial-document tasks, compared with 78.2% for the best frontier model tested—at nearly 14 times lower inference cost. If companies can get better results from specialized models they own compared to the much more expensive general-purpose ones, the trillion dollar valuation story will crumble. I break down stories like this every Sunday in my newsletter, not just what happened, but how all the pieces connect. Hit follow and check my link in bio to subscribe. #opensource #thinkingmachineslab #enterpriseai #shouldbeme