Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines drops Inkling, an open-weights model anyone can access
Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab Inc. today launched its first foundation model with the release of Inkling, making its full open weights available to developers so they can fine-tune it as they wish.
Inkling is the first fully trained from scratch model released by Thinking Machines, coming after a year in which the company mostly made headlines for its sizable funding rounds and its partnership with Nvidia Corp.
In a blog post, Thinking Machines explained that Inkling is a mixture-of-experts model that features 975 billion parameters, although for the average prompt it will only draw on a fraction of that number – around 41 billion – in order to process tasks faster and keep costs low. The company said the model was trained on about 45 trillion tokens of text, image, audio and video and is able to reason natively across all four inputs. However, its outputs are limited to text only, though that includes code, styled artifacts and structured data.
The launch of Inkling suggests that Thinking Machines wants to provide the growing number of Western companies embracing lower-cost Chinese AI models with an alternative to those systems. That’s because the model seemingly fills a gap in the Western open-source AI ecosystem, which has lagged far behind that of China’s. That gap has only increased since Meta Platforms Inc. abandoned its Lama family of models in favor of a more proprietary approach with its latest AI systems.
