Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, has launched her first major AI product. Her startup, Thinking Machines Lab, released Inkling, a massive multimodal AI model, marking a significant move in the open-source AI landscape.
The company, founded after Murati's departure from OpenAI, secured a $2 billion investment at a $12 billion valuation in July 2025, led by Andreessen Horowitz and other major tech investors.
Inkling is a 975-billion-parameter model trained from scratch and released with all its weights publicly available under a permissive Apache 2.0 license. It is designed for advanced agentic tasks, scoring 74.1% on the MCP Atlas benchmark, significantly outperforming other leading Western open-weights models.
While Chinese models like GLM 5.2 and Kimi K2.6 still lead on specific benchmarks, Inkling provides a crucial alternative for Western developers requiring compliance, security, or a values-aligned platform. The model supports text, image, and audio inputs with a 1-million-token context window.
Thinking Machines has also previewed Inkling-Small, a smaller version with 276 billion parameters, and offers fine-tuning capabilities through its Tinker cloud platform.