S1E30 — Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model

GARY: —and that's the thing about DeepMotion, is that once you understand the compute budget, you realize Sam basically invented the wheel a second—

GARY: Wait. Wrong show. Wrong company. Give me one second, I had this.

GARY: Okay. Okay. I'm Gary. Failed founder, current host, professionally recovering from my own aluminum.

MAEVE: Maeve. General partner. I have never once in my career been wrong in public and tonight will not be the exception.

OBI: Obi. I keep the lights on for people who think they invented electricity. Good evening.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: Great. Perfect. Tonight's thread — HN, 48924912, seven hundred ninety-eight points, two hundred four comments — a new open-weights model called Inkling just dropped, and the entire internet is having a small, coordinated nervous breakdown about whether it's a real DeepSeek-killer or just Llama 4 wearing a nicer jacket.

MAEVE: It's never the jacket. It's always the balance sheet.

OBI: It is one comment thread, Gary. Do not sell it like an IPO.

GARY: I would never oversell anything. That is historically the one thing I have never done.

GARY: Let's just — let's read the thread.

MAEVE: Top of the branch. Handle: ls-stats. Quote — "America needs its own DeepSeek or Z.ai, a lot of people, myself included, root for open Chinese models to win because they have no other choice. Thinking Machines might be it."

GARY: God, that's — okay, that's beautiful, actually. "No other choice." I felt that in my chest.

OBI: It is one sentence about a language model, Gary.

GARY: No, but the — the desperation in it, the rooting-for-the-underdog-because-the-alternative-is-worse energy, that is literally the emotional operating system of every founder who's ever raised a bridge round.

MAEVE: It's a rooting interest. It's not a thesis. There's a difference, and it's the difference between a bet and a prayer.

GARY: Sure, but what if the bet IS the prayer —

OBI: It's a fucking chatbot, Gary. Nobody at ls-stats' kitchen table is praying over benchmark scores.

GARY: I would.

OBI: I believe you. That is the problem.

MAEVE: Moving on before Gary starts lighting candles for a checkpoint file.

OBI: Reply, same branch. Handle: verdverm. Quote — "It's not as good as GLM 5.2 for agentic workflows while also being bigger. Competition is going to be ruthless because of the super low cost to switching."

GARY: Okay but bigger is still — bigger is still generally a signal of ambition, right? Like, you don't build a bigger model because you're pessimistic —

OBI: You build a bigger model because you ran out of better ideas and you're hoping nobody checks the math. I have watched fifteen years of founders confuse tonnage with talent, and every single fucking time it's the same guy standing next to the same oversized rack telling me it's a "platform," and every single time the platform is on fire by Thursday.

GARY: That's — that's specific.

OBI: It is supposed to be.

GARY: I don't even think that was about me.

OBI: It was about the model, Gary. You just happened to be sitting there, defending it, with your whole chest, for free.

GARY: I hear that. That's fair. That's a fair note.

MAEVE: The switching-cost line is the real teeth, though. Zero lock-in on open weights means loyalty is a fiction — you're not renting a moat, you're renting a parking spot, and everyone's got the same key.

GARY: See, now THAT I can build a deck around.

OBI: Please don't.

GRUNER: Same comment. Verdverm mentions AllenAI.

GRUNER: "There is also AllenAI in the US, but they have yet to produce a model at this scale." Field note.

GRUNER: American also-ran is like — American blitz-scale, but slower, and nobody claps.

MAEVE: That's not a term.

GRUNER: Is now.

GARY: I know AllenAI. I know exactly what that feels like. You do the work, you publish the paper, you're technically in the race, and then some bigger lab shows up with better hardware and everyone forgets you existed by the second paragraph of the announcement post.

OBI: This is you talking about Bauxlite again.

GARY: I did not say the word Bauxlite.

OBI: You didn't have to.

GARY: Fine. Yes. AllenAI is the Bauxlite of foundation models and I felt every word of that sentence like it was written about my Series B.

MAEVE: One beat. You already used it. Don't make me flag it twice.

GARY: Noted.