Thinking Machines releases first AI model
Thinking Machines Lab unveiled its first AI model more than a year after former OpenAI executive Mira Murati (pictured) founded the start-up, moving it from research previews to a full launch.
The Inkling model is designed to reason natively across text, images and audio, while balancing cost against performance through variable, adjustable effort.
Thinking Machines stated the model is trained to exhibit safe behaviour across all modalities.
The company noted Inkling is a mixture-of-experts transformer with 975 billion total parameters and 41 billion active parameters, supporting a context window of up to 1 million tokens.
Thinking Machines described it as the first in a family of models of varying sizes.
Rather than chasing state-of-the-art performance in a single domain, Thinking Machines said it trained Inkling for solid capabilities across agentic tasks, reasoning, coding, instruction-following, factuality, vision and audio, positioning it as a foundation model for future releases.
The company acknowledged Inkling is not the most performant model available today, closed or open.
Inkling is open-weight, meaning developers can download and customise the model without access to training data or source code.
It is available for fine-tuning on Tinker, Thinking Machines’ developer platform, alongside a so-called Inkling Playground for testing the model directly.
Bloomberg reported Thinking Machines is not aiming to monetise the model itself; the company currently generates revenue through Tinker, which it sells to customers including hedge fund Bridgewater Associates for financial-task fine-tuning.
The news outlet noted Murati’s company raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation last year and was reportedly in talks over a larger subsequent round, though it added several employees have since departed for firms including Meta Platforms and OpenAI.
Bloomberg also reported the launch could help fill a gap in the US open model market, as Meta shifts focus on proprietary offerings and rising AI spending pushes some users toward freely available Chinese models.
Thinking Machines was founded in early 2025 by Murati and a host of other former OpenAI employees, with the company initially focused on collaboration between the technology and people.
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