Mira Murati spent roughly 18 months after leaving OpenAI building something quietly. No product launches, no demos, no press tours. Just infrastructure work, a massive fundraise, and a lot of hiring. Now the curtain is coming back, just a little, with the debut of Inkling, the first public model from Thinking Machines Lab.
Inkling is an open-weights model, meaning developers can download, modify, and deploy it without routing everything through a centralized API.
What Thinking Machines actually built
The lab was founded in February 2025, and it moved fast. Within weeks of launching, Thinking Machines closed what research suggests was the largest seed round in venture capital history: $2B at a $12B valuation.
Backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, and Jane Street. Nvidia also signed a multiyear chip supply agreement in March 2026, locking in access to its Vera Rubin accelerators.
