Workshop Labs is Joining Thinking Machines
Rudolf Laine and Luke Drago
April 13, 2026
We founded Workshop Labs to make people irreplaceable. Today, we’re excited to announce that Workshop Labs is joining Thinking Machines to advance that mission.
Workshop Labs didn’t start with a typical startup journey; we grew out of The Intelligence Curse, an essay series on the economics of transformative AI. We started by asking what happens if AI takes everyone’s job. We concluded that cutting people out of the economy leaves them disempowered. We didn’t like that answer, so we proposed a plan to make people matter more than ever even as AI gets more powerful.
When we published The Intelligence Curse, Thinking Machines was only a few months old. We didn't know it at the time, but it articulated many of their hopes and fears about AI. It was shared with newcomers to help them understand their mission and discussed vigorously internally.
Like them, we weren’t content to just write essays. Changing the trajectory of a powerful technology requires putting words into action. We believed then as now that the industry can build AI that works for you instead of automating you for someone else. So we started Workshop Labs.
The vision at Workshop Labs was to build AI systems tailored to each person's unique knowledge, taste, and values. In doing so, we aimed to decentralize ownership and control over AI and the future it creates. Our team, small in number and few in resources, built the first integrated private post-training & inference stack, reached best-in-class training speeds for trillion-parameter models, designed methods to align models to individual users, and built an end-to-end product that let anyone tailor a model with their data in just a few clicks. This is all a testament to the entire team’s belief in the mission and hard work to advance it.
As we worked, our relationship with Thinking Machines grew closer. They gave us early access to Tinker, which reimagined post-training in a way we wish we had thought of. We shared research ideas, discussed the mission, and kept moving on parallel tracks.
Through many conversations with Mira and John, we came to understand the depth of overlap on the mission. John was giving talks on ways to keep humans competitive as early as 2023. Mira has repeatedly emphasized the need for AI to work alongside humans, not in place of them. And over the last few weeks, as we met even more of the team, it became clear that this belief is deeply held throughout the lab.
We didn’t found Workshop Labs to do any random startup. We founded it because we wanted to keep the future human. This made joining forces with Thinking Machines the obvious choice.
There's a path for AI to make people matter more, and we’re going to do our best to build it. We couldn’t be prouder to join Thinking Machines to see this work through.
We thank Tim Kostolansky, Oscar Moxon, Daniel McCann-Sayles, Addie Foote, Jacob Falkovich, Horace He, and Mira Murati for reviewing drafts of this post.