Mira Murati's Thinking Machines drops Inkling, an open-weights model anyone can access
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab Inc. today launched its first foundation model with the release of Inkling, making its full open weights available to developers so they can fine-tune it as they wish. Inkling is the first model fully trained from scratch by Thinking Machines, coming after a year in which the company mostly made [...
Key Takeaways
- SiliconANGLE UPDATED 19:51 EDT / JULY 15 2026 AI Mira Murati's Thinking Machines drops Inkling, an open-weights model anyone can access by Mike Wheatley Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab Inc.
Inkling is the first model fully trained from scratch by Thinking Machines, coming after a year in which the company mostly made headlines for its sizable funding rounds and its partnership with Nvidia Corp.
- The launch of Inkling suggests that Thinking Machines wants to provide the growing number of Western companies embracing lower-cost Chinese AI models with an alternative to those systems.
That's because the model seemingly fills a gap in the Western open-source AI ecosystem, which has lagged far behind that of China's.
- It also features "thinking effort" controls that allow developers to make tradeoffs, such as sacrificing processing speed for accuracy.
Uniquely, the model will also flag its outputs for uncertainty, instead of simply pushing out hallucinations.
- co/m7q5RsX0Ud - Mira Murati (@miramurati) July 15, 2026 Futurum Group analyst Mitch Ashely told the Wall Street Journal that the open-weight model ecosystem has been dominated by Chinese AI firms for the last year, and that Inkling is the first Western alternative to those systems.
"It gives Western enterprises a credible alternative positioned on customization economics, shifting spend from per-token API pricing to infrastructure the enterprise controls," he said.
- Instead of making Inkling available in a rigid chatbot-style app, it's positioned as a base model that organizations should fine-tune and run themselves on their own infrastructure.
Stats & Key Facts
- #SiliconANGLE UPDATED 19:51 EDT / JULY 15 2026 AI Mira Murati's Thinking Machines drops Inkling, an open-weights model anyone can access by Mike Wheatley Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab Inc.
- #In a blog post, Thinking Machines explained that Inkling is a mixture-of-experts model that features 975 billion parameters, although for the average prompt it will only draw on a small fraction of that number - about 41 billion - in order to process tasks faster and keep costs low.
- #The company said the model was trained on about 45 trillion tokens of text, image, audio and video and can reason natively across all four inputs.
- #co/m7q5RsX0Ud - Mira Murati (@miramurati) July 15, 2026 Futurum Group analyst Mitch Ashely told the Wall Street Journal that the open-weight model ecosystem has been dominated by Chinese AI firms for the last year, and that Inkling is the first Western alternative to those systems.
SiliconANGLE UPDATED 19:51 EDT / JULY 15 2026 AI Mira Murati's Thinking Machines drops Inkling, an open-weights model anyone can access by Mike Wheatley Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab Inc. today launched its first foundation model with the release of Inkling , making its full open weights available to developers so they can fine-tune it as they wish. Inkling is the first model fully trained from scratch by Thinking Machines, coming after a year in which the company mostly made headlines for its sizable funding rounds and its partnership with Nvidia Corp.
In a blog post, Thinking Machines explained that Inkling is a mixture-of-experts model that features 975 billion parameters, although for the average prompt it will only draw on a small fraction of that number - about 41 billion - in order to process tasks faster and keep costs low. The company said the model was trained on about 45 trillion tokens of text, image, audio and video and can reason natively across all four inputs. However, its outputs are limited to text only, though that includes code, styled artifacts and structured data.
The launch of Inkling suggests that Thinking Machines wants to provide the growing number of Western companies embracing lower-cost Chinese AI models with an alternative to those systems. That's because the model seemingly fills a gap in the Western open-source AI ecosystem, which has lagged far behind that of China's. That gap has only increased since Meta Platforms Inc.
For more details please read the original article at SiliconANGLE AI.
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