Movable Ink vs Thinking Machines Lab

Q3 2026 Product Announcement: Advancing Programmatic CRM with New AI, Message Creation, and Cross-Channel Capabilities

Movable Ink announced its Q3 2026 product update, advancing Programmatic CRM with new AI, message creation, and cross-channel capabilities.

Putting Task Expertise into RL Achieves State-of-the-Art Performance on Text-to-SQL

Thinking Machines Lab announced two new updates: a research breakthrough in RL for text-to-SQL and new safety research grants.

Barret Zoph Joins Google as VP of Research

Barret Zoph, co‑founder of AI startup Thinking Machines Lab and a former OpenAI employee, has taken a role as vice president of research at Google. Zoph previously co‑founded Thinking Machines with Mira Murati after leaving OpenAI in October 2024, briefly returned to OpenAI in January 2026 to lead AI enterprise sales, and departed in June 2026 after a five‑month stint. Tech reporting notes Zoph was fired from Thinking Machines earlier this year. Google said it expects Zoph to contribute reinforcement learning and post‑training expertise to its Gemini efforts. The move is one of several high‑profile executive shifts in the AI industry this year.

• Barret Zoph co‑founded Thinking Machines Lab and later rejoined OpenAI.
• Zoph spent five months at OpenAI in 2026 heading AI enterprise sales and left in June 2026.
• Zoph was reported to have been fired from Thinking Machines earlier in 2026.

AI Demands New Interaction Models for Designers

The article argues that recent multimodal AI models are changing the fundamental grammar of software interaction, shifting interfaces from task-driven, turn-taking flows to continuous, intent-driven exchanges. It highlights a research preview from Thinking Machines Lab that demonstrates real-time multimodal 'interaction models' which can listen, see, and respond across audio, video, and text while building interfaces (a generative UI) on the fly. The author outlines design implications — rebuilding mental models, new entry/navigation conventions, deliberate intervention points, and routing judgment to humans — particularly for enterprise contexts that require auditability and accountability.

• Thinking Machines Lab released a research preview called Interaction Models demonstrating real-time multimodal exchange (audio, video, and text) and on-the-spot interface generation.
• The article’s author, Arin Bhowmick, is Chief Design Officer at SAP.
• A paper from TCS Research, “Can LLMs Perceive Time?”, found top models estimate task duration four to seven times too high and cannot accurately report how long their own work took.