# Thinking Machines Lab Releases Inkling, 975B-Parameter Mixture-of-Experts Model

> Mira Murati, OpenAI's former chief technology officer, has finally shown what her secretive startup has been building. Thinking Machines Lab emerged from eighteen months of stealth to release Inkling, its first open model, a 975 billion parameter system that uses a mixture-of-experts design to activate only about 41 billion parameters for any given task. It was trained on 45 trillion tokens spanning text, images, audio, and video. The bet behind Inkling is philosophical as much as technical. Rather than chasing one giant do-everything model, Thinking Machines argues that adaptable AI, tuned to specific problems through its Tinker platform, will outperform standardized systems. That framing is a direct challenge to the scale-above-all orthodoxy of the frontier labs Murati helped build. For a roughly 200-person company, shipping an open model of this size is a statement of intent, and it lands as talent keeps churning between labs, with two of the firm's co-founders having left for OpenAI in January. Whether customization beats raw scale is now an open experiment the whole field can poke at.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: TechCrunch · Published Wednesday, July 22, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Mira Murati, OpenAI's former chief technology officer, has finally shown what her secretive startup has been building. Thinking Machines Lab emerged from eighteen months of stealth to release Inkling, its first open model, a 975 billion parameter system that uses a mixture-of-experts design to activate only about 41 billion parameters for any given task. It was trained on 45 trillion tokens spanning text, images, audio, and video. The bet behind Inkling is philosophical as much as technical. Rather than chasing one giant do-everything model, Thinking Machines argues that adaptable AI, tuned to specific problems through its Tinker platform, will outperform standardized systems. That framing is a direct challenge to the scale-above-all orthodoxy of the frontier labs Murati helped build. For a roughly 200-person company, shipping an open model of this size is a statement of intent, and it lands as talent keeps churning between labs, with two of the firm's co-founders having left for OpenAI in January. Whether customization beats raw scale is now an open experiment the whole field can poke at.

## Source

[Read the full story at TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/15/thinking-machines-amps-up-its-bet-against-one-size-fits-all-ai-with-its-first-open-model-inkling/)

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