This $12 billion startup finally shipped something...
Thinking Machines releases Inkling, a 970B-parameter Apache-licensed open-weights multimodal model.
“the weights are Apache licensed and sitting on hugging face right now”
Thinking Machines, the $12B startup founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, shipped its first major model: Inkling, a 970B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with only 41B active per token, trained on 45 trillion multimodal tokens with a 1M context window. The Apache license and Hugging Face availability make it a significant open-weights entrant, even though it benchmarks mid-table behind frontier models like Fable 5 and GPT 5.6. The open licensing strategy signals Thinking Machines is differentiating on accessibility and fine-tunability rather than raw benchmark dominance.