Ex-OpenAI CTO Murati’s Thinking Machines drops Inkling, a 975B parameter model that leads US labs but trails China
Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has released Inkling, an open-weights model with 975 billion parameters. It’s built for efficiency and agent-based tasks, but it still trails the best open-source Chinese models in overall performance.
Thinking Machines Lab has shipped its first production-ready language model. Inkling is a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer with 975 billion total parameters, 41 billion of which are active at any given time. It’s the first model from the startup founded by Mira Murati, the former OpenAI CTO who played a key role in developing ChatGPT. Unlike many other open-source AI models, Inkling natively handles text, images, and audio and supports a context window of up to one million tokens. The weights are freely available on Hugging Face. Thinking Machines also offers access through Tinker, its platform for adapting AI models to specific tasks.Ad The company is positioning Inkling as a flexible base model for customization. “Inkling is not the strongest overall model available today,” the announcement states. Thinking Machines expects the mix of multimodal support, efficient processing, and fine-tuning options to set the model apart.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1 Thinking Machines says it pre-trained Inkling on 45 trillion tokens of public and synthetic text, images, audio recordings, and videos. The training set also includes public data that “may be subject to intellectual property protection.” The company used the Chinese AI model Kimi K2.5, among other methods, to generate synthetic data. Kimi K2.5 also served as the basis for Cursor’s coding model. More technical details are available in the model card. Inkling leads U.S. open models but trails China’s best According to AI benchmarking platform Artificial Analysis, Inkling debuts with a score of 41 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. That makes it the leading open-weights model from a U.S. lab.
