Mira Murati’s AI start-up unveils customisable model Inkling

Inkling is Thinking Machines Lab’s first big AI model launch, and comes a little more than a year after the start-up was founded.

Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab has unveiled the first of its family of multimodal open-source models called Inkling. The model was the first from the start-up to be trained on Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems, following a partnership agreement between the two companies earlier this year.

Inkling does not promise to be the strongest open or closed model available, but rather markets itself as one made to be customised. It has 975bn total parameters, with 41bn active, and supports a context window of up to 1m tokens.

“Inkling is designed to be broad. We trained it across agentic, reasoning, coding, instruction-following, factuality, vision, and audio tasks, rather than narrowly optimising for one domain,” Thinking Machines Lab said in a blogpost announcing the new model on Wednesday (15 July).

The model, available to download on Hugging Face, was trained using 45trn tokens of text, images, audio and video. It can accept inputs via text, images and audio, and produces text-only outputs. It is a ‘mixture-of-experts’ transformer that follows a similar design to DeepSeek-V3, according to its maker.

Inkling’s model card places it squarely around its open-weight contemporaries, including Kimi K2.5, Kimi K2.6, GLM 5.2 and DeepSeekV4 Pro, across various benchmarks.

The launch represents Thinking Machines Lab’s first major AI model showcase after more than a year under development.

Murati, who left OpenAI while its chief technology officer in 2024, founded her start-up just months after, with plans to make “AI systems more widely understood, customisable and generally capable”.

The start-up quickly raised $2bn in July last year to hit a $12bn valuation, with reports from November suggesting that Thinking Machines Lab was already readying to raise funds at a valuation of $50bn.

Alongside Inkling, the company is also launching, in preview, Inkling-Small – a lighter-weight model with 12bn active parameters that supposedly achieves strong performance with “even lower cost and latency”.

Nvidia has taken a liking to Thinking Machines Lab, having made a “significant” investment into the start-up alongside taking the company on for a multi-year partnership to develop its AI models. The partnership is expected to have cost the chipmaker several billion dollars.

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