Thinking Machines amps up its bet against one-size-fits-all AI with its first open model, Inkling

Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released its first proprietary AI model Wednesday morning, called Inkling — and unlike the flagship models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, it’s open-weight, meaning outside developers and companies can download it and modify it directly.

Inkling is a mixture-of-experts system with 975 billion total parameters, though it only draws on a fraction of that — about 41 billion — for any given task, a common design that keeps very large models faster and cheaper to run. It was trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, image, audio, and video, and reasons natively across all three, according to the company’s own release materials.

It’s the company’s first public proof point after a year and a half spent building AI infrastructure largely out of public view. Some of that work surfaced already, in a May research preview of “interaction models” — AI designed to listen and speak (and even interrupt) instead of stop and wait as with typical chatbots. It’s also a test of the central bet behind Thinking Machines, which is that AI that organizations can adapt for themselves will outperform the one-size-fits-all models the biggest labs currently sell.

It’s an interesting model, one that’s designed to give calibrated answers, including flagging uncertainty rather than guessing, and which lets users dial “thinking effort” up or down when they want to trade for speed. On one benchmark, the company says, Inkling uses a third as many tokens as Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Ultra in order to hit the same coding performance. It’s worth noting that Thinking Machines doesn’t claim Inkling is best-in-class. Its briefing materials state explicitly that Inkling is “not the strongest model available today, closed or open.” What it’s evidently going for instead is well-rounded performance.

Of course, that raises a big question, which is who this product is targeting, beyond being decidedly an enterprise product. Thinking Machines is, for now, marketing it less as a finished work than as a starting point, something for organizations to fine-tune themselves through Tinker, the company’s model-customization platform, but this means that their own customers have to make sure their customizations are safe, for example. (Fine-tuning requires serious machine learning talent.) OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all taken a very different approach with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, respectively, which were all built to compete as general-purpose chatbots first, with agentic, autonomous features layered on top.

A post published by Thinking Machines last week was clearly meant as the backdrop for this release. AI that’s trained centrally by one company and then set in stone, the company argued in that post, underperforms AI that organizations shape themselves because so much expertise is specific to the people who hold it. The broader idea is that centralized labs are selling everyone the same product, repeatedly refined by the lab that built it, while enterprises willing to own and customize their own models can wring far more value from them.

It’s an argument that’s gaining steam. In a blog post published Sunday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella — whose company has invested billions in both OpenAI and Anthropic — warned that enterprises using proprietary AI models effectively pay twice: once in subscription costs, and again by handing over business knowledge embedded in their thousands of prompts and corrections, which can be absorbed into future model versions.

Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue made a similar prediction in conversation with TechCrunch last week. Frontier models, he said, will increasingly be reserved for experimentation and high-value tasks, while most production AI work shifts to private or open-source alternatives — the exact split Thinking Machines is building around.

The clearest evidence for Thinking Machine’s argument came from a recent project with Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund (which is not, for what it’s worth, a Thinking Machines investor). Researchers from both companies took an existing open-source model and trained it further on Bridgewater’s own financial expertise. The result was said to score 84.7% on financial reasoning tests, beating top proprietary AI models, while costing roughly a fourteenth as much to run, though those results come from the two companies’ own evaluation, not an independent one.

Either way, Thinking Machines is emphasizing how quickly it got here. OpenAI took roughly five years to bring tech to market and show revenue, and Anthropic roughly three. Thinking Machines says it did the same in about nine months.

Some will wonder whether Inkling was trained on outputs from competitors’ models, a practice known as distillation that has drawn scrutiny industry-wide. The short answer, per the company’s own materials, is partly. Thinking Machines pretrained Inkling from scratch, but it says it used other open-weight models — including Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5 — to help generate some of its early post-training data before large-scale reinforcement learning took over. The next model, the company insists, will use fully self-contained post-training instead.

On the cost side, Thinking Machines has been more guarded. It struck a strategic partnership with Nvidia in March to deploy a gigawatt of Vera Rubin computing capacity, and says Inkling itself was trained entirely on Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 systems. But the company hasn’t said how it plans to balance that against revenue that, by most accounts, hasn’t been a primary focus so far. (A reported $50 billion fundraising round was said to be coming together last November, which multiple outlets reported had stalled by January; the company has declined to talk about its funding picture since, though Nvidia said it made a “significant investment” in Thinking Machines when the companies announced that March partnership.)

A related question is whether Thinking Machines’ spending will ever reach the scale of OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s, or whether its efficiency-driven approach means the economics look different. Put another way, the company’s bet may be less that it will eventually spend like its larger rivals than that it won’t need to at all — because once weights are public, nothing obligates anyone who downloads them to pay Thinking Machines to run them, unlike the metered access OpenAI and Anthropic sell. It’s Tinker, not the model itself, where the company’s revenue has to come from, via training, fine-tuning, and, now, a cut of the hosting ecosystem built around it.

Headcount, at least, looks more settled. Thinking Machines now employs roughly 200 people, up from levels reported after a wave of departures earlier this year, including two co-founders who left for OpenAI in January.

Thinking Machines, for its part, doesn’t seem interested in playing up individual moves the way much of the industry does. According to a source inside the company, its culture, by design, favors continuity over reliance on any one personality. It makes sense: it’s less of a setback when people change teams if they were never put on a pedestal to begin with. It’s also a remarkable thing for a company to insist on, given how much of its own story is still associated with the name of its now-famous co-founder, whether she planned it or not.