Tinker: an API for Fine-Tuning & RL
Tinker is a training API.
At Thinking Machines, we believe in the power of fine-tuning to advance AI usefulness in many domains of expertise. [Ref]
According to Thinking Machines - the lab started by former OpenAI CTO Mir Murati - Tinker lets us developers:
Control every aspect of model training and fine-tuning while we handle the infrastructure.
In other words:
Tinker lets you focus on what matters in LLM fine-tuning – your data and algorithms – while we handle the heavy lifting of distributed training.
Tinker gives you full control over the training loop and all the algorithmic details. It's not a magic black box that makes fine-tuning "easy". It's a clean abstraction that shields you from the complexity of distributed training while preserving your control.
Sounds pretty dope to us!
In this event, we’re digging into the fine-tuning-as-a-service that Tinker provides.
We’ll discuss what is similar about it, and also what makes it different from other fine-tuning APIs services that we’ve seen over the past few years.
We’ll talk about what we know (things like how Tinker definitely uses LoRA Without Regret, can be used to download and publish your own trained open weights, and how it supports VLMs and doing RL), as well as what we don’t know about how it works under the hood!
Join us live as we dive back into the wide world of fine-tuning & RL with Tinker!
🤓 Who should attend
AI Engineers, Data Scientists, MLEs, and Researchers interested in training and tuning LLMs.
AI Engineers and leaders looking to understand the latest and greatest ways to approach fine-tuning open-source models in 2026
Speaker Bios
Dr. Greg” Loughnane is the Co-Founder & CEO of AI Makerspace, where he is an instructor for The AI Engineering Bootcamp, the longest-running AI Engineering bootcamp on Maven. Since 2021, he has built and led industry-leading Machine Learning education programs. Previously, he worked as an AI product manager, a university professor teaching AI, an AI consultant and startup advisor, and an ML researcher. He loves trail running and is based in Columbus, Ohio.
Chris “The Wiz” Alexiuk is the Co-Founder & CTO at AI Makerspace, where he is an instructor for The AI Engineering Bootcamp, the longest-running AI Engineering bootcamp on Maven. During the day, he is also a Developer Advocate at NVIDIA. Previously, he was a Founding Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist, and ML curriculum developer and instructor. He’s a YouTube content creator whose motto is “Build, build, build!” He loves Dungeons & Dragons and is based in Toronto, Canada.
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