Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence company founded by exiles from OpenAI, has released its first model, Inkling, according to WIRED. The startup's new model is open-weight, meaning that researchers and startups will be able to download and modify it. This release marks a significant step in the company's effort to establish itself as a legitimate player in the competitive AI landscape.
Model Capabilities and Architecture
In a blog post, the company says Inkling was trained from scratch to make sense of audio and video input as well as text. While it isn’t the best model on popular benchmarks, it performs well at many tasks and is capable of advanced reasoning and coding. Like many open-weight models, Inkling is relatively large—975 billion parameters—and needs to run on a cluster of specialized chips.
In a sign of how AI models are increasingly being used to build AI, the lab also used Inkling to fine-tune and improve itself. According to WIRED, the best open-weight models currently come from China, but Thinking Machines Lab says Inkling offers a level of performance similar to those models.
The Natural Language Reasoning Phenomenon
According to a company source who requested anonymity to discuss the development process, researchers discovered a strange phenomenon while training Inkling. Like other models, it usually provides a natural language explanation for its complex reasoning. Inkling decided to do away with this in the name of efficiency. As the source recounted:
"It determined that the grammar was overhead, which is interesting."
The company reinstated natural language reasoning to make the models' decisions more explainable, the person added.
Company Background and Funding
Thinking Machines was founded in February 2025 by several big-name executives and researchers from OpenAI, including Mira Murati, who served as CTO (and briefly CEO) of OpenAI; John Schulman, a cofounder of OpenAI who played a key role in developing ChatGPT; and Lilian Weng, a former VP at OpenAI who led work on safety and robotics.
The startup received the largest seed funding round in history, which valued it at $12 billion out of the gate. Previously, the company released Tinker, a tool for fine-tuning models, showcased a tool that enables natural voice interactions, and published machine-learning research.
Competitive Landscape
The release of an open-weight model fits with a vision for AI that Thinking Machines Lab outlined in a recent blog post. The company said the technology shouldn’t be controlled by just a few companies and should be decentralized so that more people can build their own models with their own data.
OpenAI may have kick-started the AI boom with ChatGPT, but defector-led companies like Thinking Machines and Anthropic have muscled into the space. Anthropic recently filed for an IPO, and the company is valued at more than a trillion dollars. Its model Claude has proven popular with many businesses, especially for its coding skills.
Implications for Enterprise AI Adoption
For CTOs and technology procurement leaders, open-weight models like Inkling offer the potential for cost reduction, customization, and control over AI systems. According to WIRED, open-source models are cheaper to run than closed models, which can typically only be accessed for a fee. They can also be more easily modified for different tasks. However, the computational requirements—such as running on a cluster of specialized chips—may pose infrastructure challenges for some organizations. The balance between performance, transparency, and operational cost will be key as enterprises evaluate whether to adopt Inkling for their AI workloads.
