It's the company's first public proof point after a year and a half spent building AI infrastructure largely out of public view.
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naddr1qv…kd39Thinking Machines Lab has released its first AI model, Inkling, which is open-weight, allowing external developers to modify it. The model is designed for adaptability and reasoned outputs, with a focus on enterprise customization through their platform, Tinker. This approach contrasts with closed, general-purpose models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and aims to leverage specialized organizational expertise. - Thinking Machines Lab, founded by Mira Murati, has launched its first open-weight AI model called Inkling. - Inkling is a mixture-of-experts system with 975 billion parameters, trained on diverse data types, and reasons across text, image, audio, and video, though outputs are currently text-based. - The model is designed to be adaptable by organizations, allowing them to fine-tune it via the Tinker platform, contrasting with closed models from major AI labs. - Inkling aims for well-rounded performance and calibrated answers, allowing users to adjust 'thinking effort' for speed-vs-accuracy trade-offs. - The company's strategy is based on the belief that AI shaped by individual organizations will outperform centrally trained, fixed models. - Industry figures like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue suggest a shift towards open-source or private alternatives for enterprise AI. - A project with Bridgewater Associates reportedly showed an open-source model further trained on proprietary data outperforming top proprietary AI models at a fraction of the cost. - Thinking Machines claims rapid development time for Inkling compared to competitors. - The model used some distillation from other open-weight models during its pre-training phase, with future models planned to use fully self-contained post-training. - The company's revenue is expected to come from its Tinker platform for training and fine-tuning, rather than direct model usage fees. - Thinking Machines currently employs around 200 people and emphasizes a culture of continuity over individual personalities. Continue reading https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/15/thinking-machines-amps-up-its-bet-against-one-size-fits-all-ai-with-its-first-open-model-inkling/