Thinking Machines ships Inkling, its first open model

11:04 AM · July 15, 2026

Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, has released its first open weight model, called Inkling, according to TechCrunch. The model carries 975 billion total parameters and can be downloaded and customized directly by the organizations that use it, rather than accessed only through an API controlled by the lab that built it. Thinking Machines says the release is meant to validate its founding thesis: that AI organizations can adapt for their own needs will ultimately outperform the one size fits all models sold by the largest labs. The company also says Inkling is notably efficient, using roughly one third the tokens of competing models to reach equivalent performance, and points to its own speed to market as evidence the approach works, saying it reached this release in about nine months versus the three to five years competitors have historically needed to ship a comparable frontier scale model. The release marks a meaningful shift for a lab that had, until now, kept its work largely closed, and positions Thinking Machines as a more direct competitor to open weight efforts from Meta, Mistral, and Chinese labs rather than only to closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.