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Research Diligence Report

Thinking Machines Lab

by Mira Murati · San Francisco

42

Novelty Score

AI research startup founded after departing OpenAI as CTO. Led the technical development of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and DALL-E at OpenAI.

Generative AINLPMultimodal

42

Overall Novelty

Weighted score: how differentiated is this product's research?

40

Uniqueness

4 other products use the same papers on avg

86

Research Recency

Are the underlying papers recent (cutting-edge) or old (commoditized)?

0

Founder Authorship

Built on external research — execution-dependent

How to read this report

Novelty Score (0–100)

Measures how differentiated this product's technical approach is. Combines three signals: Uniqueness (40%) — fewer products on the same papers means a more unique approach. Research Recency (30%) — building on recent papers (2020+) suggests cutting-edge work; older papers (pre-2015) are more commoditized. Founder Authorship (30%) — if the founder authored the underlying papers, they have deep domain expertise and a technical moat.

Research Lineage

The academic papers this product builds on. Each link has a source type (who declared it: the maintainer, automated extraction from READMEs, community contribution, or AI detection) and a confidence score (0–100%). Higher confidence = stronger evidence.

Competitive Map

Other products that build on the same research papers. The overlap % shows what fraction of this product's papers are shared. 100% overlap = building on identical research. 10% = mostly different foundations.

Domain Trends

Are the domains this product operates in accelerating (more products being built recently), steady, or slowing? Based on the rate of new paper-to-product links over the last 30 and 90 days.

Paper Adoption Timeline

Shows when each product adopted each paper. If many products adopted the same paper recently, it's a trending technique. If only this product uses it, it's a differentiated bet.

Domain Trends

Is this product's domain accelerating or cooling down? Based on new paper→product links over time

Generative AIslowing
0 links (30d)186 links (90d)186 total
NLPslowing
0 links (30d)141 links (90d)141 total
Multimodalslowing
0 links (30d)13 links (90d)13 total

Paper Adoption Timeline

When did each product adopt each paper? Clustering = trending technique. Solo adoption = differentiated bet

Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents

OpenAI API PlatformMar 2026
Thinking Machines LabMar 2026
Stable DiffusionMar 2026

3 products built on this paper

GPT-4 Technical Report

OpenAI API PlatformMar 2026
OpenAI EngineeringMar 2026
Thinking Machines LabMar 2026
Scale AI Data PlatformMar 2026
Pioneer FundMar 2026
AI Grants & InvestmentsMar 2026
OpenAI Cookbook & DevRelMar 2026
Latent Space & smol.aiMar 2026
ReplitMar 2026

9 products built on this paper

Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback

Chain-of-Thought ResearchMar 2026
OpenAI EngineeringMar 2026
Thinking Machines LabMar 2026

3 products built on this paper

About this report

Research lineage is based on builder-declared paper links with provenance tracking. Novelty scores are computed from paper uniqueness (fewer products = more novel), research recency, and founder authorship. Competitive maps show other products building on the same research papers. This is not investment advice.