Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup built by former OpenAI leaders, has released its first model, putting Mira Murati’s closely watched company into the open-weight race.
The model, called Inkling, has 975 billion parameters and was trained to work across text, audio and video. The company says researchers and startups will be able to download and modify it, a choice that sets it apart from closed systems that are typically accessed through paid services.
Thinking Machines said Inkling is not the top performer on every popular benchmark, but that it performs well across many tasks, including reasoning and coding. The company also said its performance is similar to leading open-weight models from China.
The release follows the company’s earlier public pitch for a less concentrated AI ecosystem. Thinking Machines has said AI should not be controlled by only a handful of companies and should be easier for people to build with their own data.
The startup was founded in February 2025 by several former OpenAI figures, including Murati, who served as OpenAI’s chief technology officer and briefly as its chief executive. Other founding names include John Schulman, an OpenAI cofounder involved in the development of ChatGPT, and Lilian Weng, a former OpenAI vice president who worked on safety and robotics.
Before Inkling, Thinking Machines had released Tinker, a tool for fine-tuning models, shown technology for natural voice interactions and published machine-learning research.
The launch puts another OpenAI breakaway company into a field already crowded with better-funded rivals, closed model providers and cheaper open-weight alternatives.
