# 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/)

## Related coverage

- [Clearview AI Is Testing an AI Tool That Would Let Cops Unearth Your Life Online](https://www.wortins.com/story/clearview-ai-is-testing-an-ai-tool-that-would-let-cops-unear-8c573d0e) — [Wired](https://www.wired.com/story/clearview-ai-is-testing-an-ai-tool-that-lets-cops-instantly-unearth-your-online-activity/)
- [Trump officials say AI will help save rural health care. Some leaders in the field don’t believe it](https://www.wortins.com/story/trump-officials-say-ai-will-help-save-rural-health-care-some-bf0e7d83) — [STAT](https://www.statnews.com/2026/09/10/rural-health-care-ai-adoption-challenges-part-4-unraveled-series/?utm_campaign=rss)
- [Farmers Embrace AI More Than Any Other Tech, McKinsey Says](https://www.wortins.com/story/farmers-embrace-ai-more-than-any-other-tech-mckinsey-says-78dfb3ec) — [Insurance Journal](https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2026/09/09/884469.htm)
- [Sequoia doubles down on Cymphony as AI agents create new enterprise security risks](https://www.wortins.com/story/sequoia-doubles-down-on-cymphony-as-ai-agents-create-new-ent-e2ff7229) — [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/09/sequoia-doubles-down-on-cymphony-as-ai-agents-create-new-enterprise-security-risks/)
- [Powering AI is an architecture problem](https://www.wortins.com/story/powering-ai-is-an-architecture-problem-15281f16) — [MIT Technology Review](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/10/1141649/powering-ai-is-an-architecture-problem/)
- [Top AI spenders cut per-employee costs by nearly 10 percent in August](https://www.wortins.com/story/top-ai-spenders-cut-per-employee-costs-by-nearly-10-percent--b31ffb0b) — [The Decoder](https://the-decoder.com/top-ai-spenders-cut-per-employee-costs-by-nearly-10-percent-in-august/)

---

_Curated and written by [Wortins](https://www.wortins.com) — The daily AI briefing. Every story links to its original source; the "Wortins read" on each is our own original analysis. [About Wortins & our editorial approach](https://www.wortins.com/about)._