Thinking Machines is the lab of Mira Murati - the former chief technical officer of OpenAI. For a long time it showed off ideas and tools, but not a model of its own. Now it has one. It's called Inkling and it comes with open weights - meaning anyone can download it and change it, not just rent it through someone else's cloud.
Fact
The facts: on 15 July 2026 Thinking Machines announced Inkling, an open-weights model of type Mixture-of-Experts. 975 billion parameters total, but only 41 billion switch on at each step. Context up to 1 million tokens; trained on 45 trillion units of text, image, audio, and video. The weights are on Hugging Face; fine-tuning goes through their Tinker platform and partner services (Databricks, Together, Fireworks). There's also a smaller version, Inkling-Small, for cheaper and faster tasks. The company itself writes, literally: 'Inkling is not the strongest model today, open or closed' (per Thinking Machines). Source: Thinking Machines Lab, introducing-inkling, 15.07.2026.
Don't fall for the headline. Half the model news out there is fighting for one line on a leaderboard, and here the company itself says it isn't leading the leaderboard - and that's on purpose. The bet is different: not to rent you the smartest brain, but to give you a base you take home and bend to your own work. For someone who builds things, that's more interesting than any benchmark. Open weights plus a fine-tuning tool means the model can become YOURS, instead of staying someone else's black box that gets swapped out from under you tomorrow.
Here's what I'm taking away for us. I'll leave the numbers in the table to marketing - they change every two months. What matters is whether an open-weights base you can fine-tune for a specific task does a better job than the general rental model. That gets proven in practice - on our data, our task. Until then, Inkling is a promising base, not a finished answer. We'll try it, then we'll tell you.
Official primary sources
Thinking Machines Lab - Inkling: Our open-weights modelThinking Machines Lab - Inkling model cardThe visual is generated code-art, no third-party images.