Thinking Machines Lab launches its first AI model Inkling
16 Jul 2026, 08:37 PMThinking Machines said the model uses nearly a third of the tokens required by Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Ultra to achieve comparable coding performance on one benchmark.
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Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has released its first in-house artificial intelligence model, Inkling, as an open-weight system that developers and enterprises can download and modify.
Inkling is a mixture-of-experts model with 975 billion total parameters, though it uses around 41 billion parameters for a given task, the company said in a blogpost. It was trained on 45 trillion tokens spanning text, images, audio and video and is capable of reasoning across all four modalities. Its outputs are currently limited to text, including code, styled artifacts and structured data.
Inkling has been designed to provide calibrated responses by flagging uncertainty when appropriate and allows users to adjust the amount of "thinking effort" depending on whether they prioritize speed or performance. Thinking Machines said the model uses nearly a third of the tokens required by Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Ultra to achieve comparable coding performance on one benchmark.
The launch marks the company's first major public product release after spending nearly a year and a half building AI infrastructure. Earlier this year, Thinking Machines had unveiled a research preview of its "interaction models", which are designed to enable more natural voice interactions.
Unlike models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini, Inkling is being positioned primarily as a model that organizations can customize for their own requirements. The company said users will be able to fine-tune the model through Tinker, its model customization platform.
In July last year, Thinking Machines Lab had raised $2 billion in a seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz even as it was yet to launch its product then. The funding round saw participation from investors including Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNOW, CISCO, AMD and Jane Street. Earlier in March this year, Nvidia made fresh investment in the company.
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