Key facts
- Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter multimodal AI model, on July 15.
- Inkling's full weights are available on Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license.
- Inkling scored 74.1% on MCP Atlas, surpassing Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Ultra.
- Chinese models like Z.ai's GLM 5.2 and Kimi K2.6 still lead on certain benchmarks.
- Inkling accepts text, images, and audio inputs with a 1 million token context window.
Mira Murati, formerly the CTO of OpenAI, has launched her new venture, Thinking Machines Lab, with the release of Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter multimodal AI model. The model, trained from scratch, features fully open weights available for download under an Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face.
Inkling demonstrates strong performance in agentic tasks, scoring 74.1% on MCP Atlas, significantly outperforming Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Ultra. It also achieved a 77.6% score on SWE-Bench Verified. However, Chinese models such as Z.ai's GLM 5.2 and Kimi K2.6 still lead on several key benchmarks, including Terminal Bench 2.1 and Humanity's Last Exam.
Murati left OpenAI in September 2024, approximately 10 months after Sam Altman's brief ousting and reinstatement. She founded Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025 and secured a substantial $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation in July 2025, with participation from major tech firms and venture capital. Earlier reports indicated the company sought a $50 billion valuation in late 2025, but those talks reportedly collapsed by January 2026.
The Inkling model is a mixture-of-experts architecture, designed for efficient inference. It is multimodal, capable of processing text, images, and audio, and supports a large context window of 1 million tokens. The company aims to provide Western developers with a powerful open-source alternative, particularly for those hesitant to use models developed in China due to legal, security, or compliance concerns.
Thinking Machines also previewed Inkling-Small, a smaller model with 276 billion total parameters, which is expected to have its weights released after further testing.