Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released its first proprietary AI model Wednesday morning, called Inkling — and unlike the flagship models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, it’s open-weight, meaning outside developers and companies can download it and modify it directly.
Inkling is a mixture-of-experts system with 975 billion total parameters, though it only draws on a fraction of that — about 41 billion — for any given task, a common design that keeps very large models faster and cheaper to run. It was trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, image, audio, and video, and reasons natively across all three, according to the company’s own release materials.
It’s the company’s first public proof point after a year and a half spent building AI infrastructure largely out of public view. Some of that work surfaced already, in a May research preview of “interaction models” — AI designed to listen and speak (and even interrupt) instead of stop and wait as with typical chatbots. It’s also a test of the central bet behind Thinking Machines, which is that AI that organizations can adapt for themselves will outperform the one-size-fits-all models the biggest labs currently sell.
