Technology
Thinking Machines Lab releases open-weight AI model Inkling, challenging one-size-fits-all approach
July 15, 2026 at 08:29 PM
Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released its first open-weight AI model Inkling on Wednesday, designed for enterprise customization.
- Inkling is a mixture-of-experts system with 975 billion total parameters, drawing on about 41 billion per task, trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, image, audio, and video.
- Thinking Machines stated in briefing materials that Inkling is "not the strongest model available today, closed or open" and allows users to adjust "thinking effort."
- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that enterprises using proprietary AI models effectively pay twice: in subscription costs and by handing over business knowledge absorbed into future model versions.
- Bridgewater Associates and Thinking Machines reported that a fine-tuned open-source model scored 84.7% on financial reasoning tests, beating top proprietary models while costing one-fourteenth as much to run.