The new Tinker API from Thinking Machines is half-baked but great at fine tuning

I just finished testing the Tinker API launched by Mira Murati's Thinking Machines and I can honestly say, even though it feels unfinished, it's pretty great. The setup is really smooth and with some minimal coding (and using their examples in the Tinker Cookbook) I was able to fine tune a Llama 3.1 8B Base on the Romanian language in under 20 min. The result was pretty decent and eventually I got it to write better poetry than the base model, in the target language.

I mostly did it because I got some free credits from them and I was curious what a company valued at 50 billion has to offer. The product overall feels like it's half-baked since there is no real interface, but the API does a lot of the heavy lifting in the backend while maintaining this local development feeling, which I personally find pretty cool.

I put the code up on Github, if anyone is interested, but I am curious what y'all think about their approach top fine tuning.