Thinking Machines Releases Inkling, Its First Open-Weights Multimodal AI Model

Thinking Machines, the AI startup led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has released Inkling, its first open-weights model and a new entrant in the race to build frontier open models. The company says the multimodal system has 975 billion total parameters, 41 billion active parameters, and can take text, image, and audio inputs, while generating text outputs; it was trained on 45 trillion tokens and supports up to a 1 million-token context window. Its debut matters because it gives developers a large model they can download, customize, and fine-tune, positioning Thinking Machines as a more open alternative to proprietary systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.