> Does this new company have some connection to that, such as some of the same people?

Really doubt it. This "Thinking Machines" seems like an on-trend SV AI software startup, that "Thinking Machines" was a Massachusetts-based hardware company that went bankrupt 30 years ago (and whatever's left is Oracle). That "Thinking Machines" people are retiring by now.

I wonder if Sun/Oracle let the trademark lapse, because if it's still active I'd imagine this startup's gonna get sued.

No relation AFAIK, this is Mira Murati's post-OpenAI joint.

Which makes the hero image on this page being a diagram of Danny Hillis' TinkerToy computer all the more baffling.

nope, this is Mira Murati's thinking machines. she used to be the CTO of OpenAI, but started her own thing once she [I think] realized that she was missing out on the gold rush by staying there.

Yeah, I'm really curious about their stacked multi-tenant lora training at the same time. If this gets commoditised enough, it could be interesting to try "end of the day fine-tunes on daily conversations" and see where that leads. Or a targeted RL on "missed / rejected tasks" for an agent, after you get enough samples for a run, and so on.

They seem to position themselves to commoditise renting shovels to use with your own data. Seems pretty bubble-safe to me.

That's a fair valuation if they have a >10% chance of developing a frontier model. It's an excessive valuation if they just release tools to create LoRAs and such.