Thinking Machines Lab releases large open-weight AI model

Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, launched its first major AI model on July 15, positioning it as a new Western contender in the open-source landscape. The model, named Inkling, is a large-scale, open-weight system that developers can freely download, modify, and deploy, challenging the closed, proprietary approach of leading AI companies.

Inkling is a multimodal model with 975 billion total parameters, built on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture that activates approximately 41 billion parameters per task to manage computational costs. It processes text, audio, and video natively and supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens. The company is releasing the model under a permissive Apache 2.0 license and has made it available on platforms including Hugging Face, Databricks, and its own Tinker customization platform. A lighter variant, Inkling-Small, was also released.

The launch represents a significant milestone for Thinking Machines Lab, which Murati founded in February 2025 after departing OpenAI. The company raised $2 billion in seed funding and has argued that enterprises want AI models they can...