# Thinking Machines releases Inkling, its first open-weight model

> Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab has released its first open model, Inkling, and the pitch is as much philosophical as technical. It is a mixture-of-experts system with 975 billion total parameters that lights up only about 41 billion for any given task, a design that keeps the model large in capacity but cheaper to run. It was trained on 45 trillion tokens spanning text, image, audio, and video, and the weights are available to download and modify directly. The bigger story is the bet behind it. Where most frontier labs push a single flagship meant to be all things to all users, Thinking Machines argues that the real value is customization, letting developers reshape a capable base for their own domains. Pulling this together in roughly nine months signals how fast a well-funded lab can now move. For anyone tracking where AI is heading, Inkling is a marker that the open-weight camp is no longer just chasing the leaders on benchmarks. It is proposing a different shape for the whole ecosystem, one where you tune the model to the job rather than the other way around.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: TechCrunch · Published Saturday, July 18, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab has released its first open model, Inkling, and the pitch is as much philosophical as technical. It is a mixture-of-experts system with 975 billion total parameters that lights up only about 41 billion for any given task, a design that keeps the model large in capacity but cheaper to run. It was trained on 45 trillion tokens spanning text, image, audio, and video, and the weights are available to download and modify directly. The bigger story is the bet behind it. Where most frontier labs push a single flagship meant to be all things to all users, Thinking Machines argues that the real value is customization, letting developers reshape a capable base for their own domains. Pulling this together in roughly nine months signals how fast a well-funded lab can now move. For anyone tracking where AI is heading, Inkling is a marker that the open-weight camp is no longer just chasing the leaders on benchmarks. It is proposing a different shape for the whole ecosystem, one where you tune the model to the job rather than the other way around.

## 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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