a few days ago, the former OpenAI Lai Weng, vice president of Chinese security and now co-founder of AI startup Thinking Machines Lab, has been working on the project for the past few years.Lilian Weng) retweeted a hardware demo video with the caption "We'll make hardware someday."
The author of the video forwarded by Weng Li is known to be Stephen Roller, a former Google DeepMind employee who jumped to Character AI and is now with Thinking Machines Lab, according to Roller:
Some teams need to determine the learning rate for training through parameter traversal, heuristics, or the Scaling Law. But at Character, we just let Noam Shazeer manually tune it to the right value.
Thinking Machines Lab was officially announced in February of this year, and most of its lineup comes from OpenAI's old team, including Barret Zoph, John Schulman, and others. The company's goal is to create AI systems that are more practical, smarter, and more relevant to human needs.
Previously, it was reported that Thinking Machines Lab had raised more than $100 million in initial funding, thanks to Mira Murati's fame, even though it hadn't released any products. In April, Business Insider reported that Thinking Machines Lab had raised more than $2 billion in funding, valuing the company at at least $10 billion.
It's worth noting that OpenAI has also recently announced a deep collaboration with former Apple chief designer Jony Ive to create a new company called io. Both companies hope to bring hardware devices with new AI interactions to the public.