Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released its first public model on Wednesday. Inkling is an open-weights AI model designed to give developers more flexibility than monolithic frontier models.
The company has spent the past year and a half building AI infrastructure largely out of public view. Inkling represents its first concrete proof point, offering an alternative to the trend toward ever-larger closed models that dominate the market today.
SiliconAngle and TechStartups also covered the launch, noting that Inkling positions itself as a challenger to models from Kimi and Nemotron. The release signals that Thinking Machines is betting the AI industry’s future belongs to specialized, customizable models rather than a single general-purpose approach.
