Tinker: Announcing Research and Teaching Grants

Oct 29, 2025

We launched Tinker nearly one month ago. Since then, researchers across academia and non-profits have been using Tinker to train custom models and advance their research.

Today, we’re launching research and teaching grants for Tinker access. As part of our commitment to open and collaborative science, we want to make it as easy as possible for students and scholars to use Tinker. If your research or teaching involves training open-weight LLMs, we encourage you to apply.

We’re offering two types of grants to support your work:

• Teaching Grants: We provide $250 in free credits per student for academic classes using Tinker, whether you’re integrating it into an assignment or enabling students to use Tinker for self-directed projects, this is sized to support your entire class for the duration of the course.

• Research Grants: We provide grants starting at $5,000 to support research projects and open-source software that uses Tinker.

A selection of early grants we have awarded:

• Diyi Yang’s Stanford class on Human-Centered LLMs uses Tinker to compare different approaches for training personalized LLMs that capture unique writing styles and align with user habits.

• Aviral Kumar and Katerina Fragkiadaki’s CMU class on Deep RL will use Tinker to enable class projects to experiment with state-of-the-art methods for training LLM and VLM based policies via RL.

• Grant Rotskoff’s lab at Stanford is fine-tuning small-molecule chemistry models with Tinker to help solve problems in computational chemistry.

Instructors, please apply for teaching grants here.

Researchers, please apply for research grants here.

We’re assessing applications on a rolling basis and will aim to respond within a week of your application.