Unveiling Distributed AI - The Jaeden Schafer Podcast

Summary

Summary of "Unveiling Distributed AI" Episode of The Joe Rogan Experience of AI

Release Date: July 19, 2025

Introduction

In the episode titled "Unveiling Distributed AI," The Joe Rogan Experience of AI dives deep into the recent developments surrounding Miriam Moratti and her ambitious AI startup, Thinking Machine Labs, popularly known on Twitter as Thinky. The host sets the stage by highlighting Thinky's impressive achievements, including a substantial $2 billion funding round and a pre-launch valuation of $12 billion.

Funding and Valuation

The episode opens with a discussion about Miriam Moratti's remarkable success in securing funding for Thinky. The host emphasizes the significance of the $2 billion raised, noting that it positions Thinky as one of the top-funded AI startups to date. This funding surge increases the company's valuation from an initial $10 billion to a staggering $12 billion even before the official launch of their product.

[00:00] Host: "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."

Founder’s Background and Credibility

Miriam Moratti’s background is a focal point of the discussion. The host underscores her credibility by detailing her tenure at OpenAI, where she was a founding team member and briefly served as interim CEO. Her role as CTO at OpenAI, overseeing significant projects like the image generator, showcases her expertise and leadership in the AI domain.

[09:20] Host: "Miriam Moratti, of course, is famous for coming from OpenAI. She's one of the founding team members. [...] She was the interim CEO for, I think, one or two days at OpenAI."

Thinky's Vision and Product Strategy

Thinky's mission, as articulated by Moratti, revolves around advancing collaborative general intelligence. The startup aims to develop multimodal AI systems that seamlessly integrate with natural human interactions, encompassing conversation, sight, and collaborative processes.

[12:45] Host: "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, through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate."

The host speculates that Thinky’s focus on "collaborative" AI implies a tool designed for team or enterprise use, enabling multiple users to interact and collaborate within a single AI thread.

Funding Sources and Strategic Partnerships

The substantial funding Thinky received was spearheaded by prominent investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (16Z), renowned as America's leading venture capital firm. Additional participation came from tech giants like Nvidia, which aligns with their investment in AI infrastructure, alongside ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, and Jane Street.

[22:30] Host: "They said, 'we have the partners in place, they have the money, they're going to be training their own models.' [...] They had 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."

Product Launch and Open Source Commitment

Thinky is on the cusp of launching its first product, expected within the next few months. The product promises a significant open-source component, aiming to benefit researchers and startups engaged in developing custom AI models. Additionally, Thinky plans to share its scientific advancements to aid the research community in understanding frontier AI systems.

[16:10] Host: "They said, 'we're excited that in the next couple 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.'"

Community and Industry Response

The host reflects on the broader implications of Thinky's funding and potential impact on the AI landscape. He notes the skepticism surrounding large seed rounds in Silicon Valley but counters it with confidence in Thinky's solid foundation and credible leadership.

[35:50] Host: "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. [...] She has a really incredible team that she's been able to pull together."

Community reactions on platforms like Twitter (referred to as X) are briefly touched upon, displaying a mix of humor and anticipation regarding Thinky’s future endeavors.

[30:00] Host: "The responses on X have been kind of funny. Dylan Patel said, 'please honor the nickname everyone uses. Thinky.' Someone said, 'due to inflation, $1 million seed rounds are now $1 billion.'"

Competitive Landscape and Future Prospects

The host discusses the competitive nature of the AI industry, citing examples like XAI's rapid development and market entry with their model, Grok. He highlights the potential for Thinky to introduce significant innovations that could challenge established players like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind.

[40:10] Host: "But I think it's possible to do, to leapfrog the entire industry in like one specific domain. [...] we'll see more and more in the, in the future what this company is able to do and if Thinking Machine Labs is able to come up with something impressive after being out for just a year."

Conclusion and Future Updates

Wrapping up, the host expresses excitement about Thinky's trajectory and promises to keep the audience updated on their progress. He also promotes his own startup, AI Box, a beta playground platform that allows users to experiment with various AI models, reflecting the episode's theme of exploring cutting-edge AI technologies.

[45:30] Host: "We'll 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 'legitimate threat to leading AI models.' [...] 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."

Key Takeaways

Thinky's Massive Funding: Secured $2 billion with a $12 billion valuation pre-product launch.
Miriam Moratti’s Leadership: Leveraging her extensive experience from OpenAI to drive Thinky's vision.
Collaborative AI Focus: Development of multimodal AI tools aimed at enhancing team collaboration.
Open Source Commitment: Plans to release open-source components and share scientific breakthroughs.
Strong Investor Backing: Supported by top-tier investors and strategic partnerships with tech giants.
Competitive Edge: Positioned to potentially challenge leading AI entities with innovative solutions.
Community Engagement: Active interest and anticipation within the AI community and beyond.

This episode provides a comprehensive overview of Thinky's emergence as a formidable player in the AI industry, underscored by substantial funding, visionary leadership, and a commitment to collaborative and open-source AI development. As the AI landscape continues to evolve, Thinky's progress will be pivotal to watch.

Transcript

Host (0:00)

Miriam Moratti has just raised $2 billion for her AI startup, Thinking Machine Labs, or as 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 that I talk about on the podcast here, there's new ones coming out every single week and sometimes every day. I'd love for you to go check out AI Box. AI, that's my own startup. We just launched our beta playground platform where you can go try the top 40 models. That's text, image, audio, all in the same chat. So you can just toggle between any model, switch between them. You can also ask one question and you can get it to regenerate the response with tons of different AI models. So if you want to test out if Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT answers your particular question, the best you can do all of that. We have benchmark data and all sorts of interesting stuff. It's 20 bucks a month and you get access to all of them. So you don't have to have subscriptions to Every platform, including 11 labs for audio, tons of cool image generators you may not have tried yet. It's all on there. So if you want to check it out, AI Box AI. There is a link in the description. All right, let's get into what Miriam Miradi is doing. So what's interesting here, Miriam Moratti, of course, is famous for coming from OpenAI. 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 SP spin out of OpenAI. We've had a lot of them leave OpenAI and go spin up their own companies and raise huge amounts of money. And Miriam Moradi, she is, you know, a very serious player. She was the interim CEO for, I think, one or two days at OpenAI. So she's got a great track record. And she was actually in charge, I believe she was The CTO at one point, and she was in charge of a lot of the most impressive products that came out of OpenAI, including, I believe, their image generator. So what's interesting here, she's. She's spinning out this whole new thing and it has been very secretive. If you go to their website, there is very little information that has, that we've essentially been able to find on there. But she took 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, 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. Okay, already. 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 and everyone else, it's like the sig, it's that 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. They're the $2 billion they've raised, they're definitely going to be able to train some impressive models. And then we know they are to have a partnership with Google, that they made Google Cloud in the past to do a lot of this. So they have the 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 and the way she's differentiated differentiating herself is the word a 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 this is going to be a tool that's probably for teams, probably for enterprise or, 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. They just raised $2 billion. I don't think they get to raise that 2 billion after I, I believe they already raised a billion and I don't think they'd be able to like, hey, we raised 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 gotten the funding. They probably showed a demo to the investors. Um, so they said, we're excited that in the next couple 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. They'll 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 they'll also be able to share, which is, you know, 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 OpenAI 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, you know, the science behind it. They, she talked a little bit about who they raised money from, which was a 16Z who actually led this. So, you know, the number one venture capital company in America is leading this. They had 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, you know, buying their own book or whatever. But I mean, great play by Nvidia. No, no, hate there a cell, another top VC ServiceNow, 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 her 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 raised, 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. So this is interesting. The responses on X have been kind of funny. 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 Thinky's first product. All right, well, it sounds like it's Thinky. That's the name of the company going forward. But overall, really exciting. 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, 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, this, this 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 different news outlets, uh, 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. Um, we're not a hundred percent sure if it's going to be an open source model that they're releasing. They, they kind of alluded to this sort of open tool. And so like, we know that it's cool when, when these AI models are completely open source, but we also know that some people are sort of sneaky, like Alameta 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, you know, 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, we don't know what exactly that's going to look like as far as if 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 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, that's what their website says. And we also know that this isn't the only way that people have that they've, you know, that they have tried to get money. They actually had an offer allegedly from Meta to acquire the entire company that never, according to insiders, that never actually went to an offer that Meta made. But we know right at this point Meta is offering these a hundred million dollar deals to a whole bunch of researchers. She has a ton of the top researchers at her company. So I think Meta would love to acquire them. Probably the tech they have would be super cool. Meta's 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. That's what TechCrunch says, like opening anthropic DeepMind. I don't know, I mean I would love for there to be more competition in the field. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say before seeing any sort of product or any sort of deliverable what, what the competition rate is. I think everyone has been shocked by a company like for example XAI that was able to come up with Grok and built spin up a bunch of you know, data centers and AI tools very quickly and you know, their, their latest benchmarks had it as the number one AI model. So and then they launch like within a year. So I think it's possible to do, to leapfrog the entire industry in like one specific domain. Right. Grok did it with just kind of text and PhD research responses. It's not the best, doesn't have anything from video or very the best audio or anything really great for image. So I think we're, we're going to see more and more in the, 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 Miriam Miri came out of the blue. She's obviously one of the top brass at at OpenAI, the co founder, so that's why she's able to get, I think the resources team and build something this impressive. So it'd be interesting to see if anyone can replicate that. But in any case, this is absolutely 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. We're excited to see what happens. I'll keep you up to date 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 we'll be adding as they're released, go check out AI Box AI as always, there's a link in the description. Make sure to leave a rating or review for the podcast if you want to learned anything new and if you enjoyed the episode today. Thanks so much for tuning in and I will catch you next time.