Summary
According to a post on X by @iamgrigorev, Thinking Machines has published a write-up titled "End-to-End 4-Bit Training," by Jack Cook and colleagues. It describes how Inkling 2 Small (594B total, 17B active) was trained with a native NVFP4 forward pass, from the first pretraining step through the final RL rollout. The approach uses NVFP4 in the expert layers, MXFP8 backward passes with re-quantization and stochastic rounding, and quantized GPU communication. The lab reportedly cites an 8% figure, but the available text is cut off before it explains what that number measures.
AI-assisted summary based on the listed source.
What happened
Thinking Machines posted "End-to-End 4-Bit Training," by Jack Cook and colleagues, explaining how Inkling 2 Small (594B total, 17B active) was trained with a native NVFP4 forward pass from the first pretraining step through the final RL rollout: NVFP4 in the expert layers, MXFP8 backward passes with...
Why it matters
Teams training large models on low-precision hardware could use this description as a reference for applying 4-bit formats across pretraining, backward passes and reinforcement learning. The snippet only partly shows the write-up, so readers should check the original post before relying on the 8% result or its basis. Watch for independent testing or replication of the reported results.
What this means for you
Hardware and robotics watchers may want to track whether this becomes a product, benchmark, or deployment signal.
Signal Intelligence
Signal Strength 83%
Technical label WATCH
Public Interest 39
Category ROBOTS & HARDWARE
Reader Depth TECHNICAL
Signal Strength reflects source quality, relevance, freshness and evidence. Public Interest helps organize discovery; it is not proof of truth.
Public Interest components
Recognizable Entity Score 51
Practical Impact Score 0
Novelty Interest Score 94
Consequence Score 10
Curiosity Score 0
Shareability Score 56
Why this is here
VQV surfaced this signal because it is recent, relevant to LLM Inference, connected to Scobleizer News Pulse (X).
