Miju LabsWhy they are on the map
Author of 'Modular Manifolds' (Sep 2025); optimisation research source — evidence dated 2025-09
Shapes what 'good data' means.
How Thinking Machines Lab buys data
Dedicated 'Data Operations' team (job posted 25 Aug 2026): owns data projects 'from sourcing and vendor selection through quality review and delivery', finds 'the best vendors, experts, and data sources', builds partnerships with data vendors incl. international ones. 'Product Manager - Post Training' (Sep 2026) says Inkling was post-trained across math, agentic code, audio, image, chat and safety with >30M RL rollouts; also open: 'Research, Post-Training Evals' (evals for 'personalized preferences' with 'the data flywheel'), 'Research, Vision Expertise', 'Research, Audio Expertise', 'Research, Post-Training Data'. Inkling safety post (31 Jul 2026) names Scale AI and Handshake AI as external evaluators. Early Inkling post-training data was bootstrapped from Kimi K2.5 outputs (TechCrunch, Jul 2026).
Flat research org under CEO Murati, CTO Soumith Chintala (since Jan 2026) and Chief Scientist John Schulman; 'multimodal-first', one team across modalities. Data Operations sits in Product Management and serves researchers as an internal vendor-management function; post-training has its own PM. Heavy founder churn: Zoph, Metz, Schoenholz (OpenAI, Jan 2026), Tulloch, Joshua Gross (Meta), Chaplot (xAI, Mar 2026), Lilian Weng (left Jul 2026).
Known vendors: scale-ai, handshake-ai, FAR.AI (safety eval), Apollo Research (safety eval)
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