Thinking Machines Lab releases Inkling, its first open-weights model (975B MoE)
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling on 2026-07-15: a 975B-parameter (41B active) natively multimodal MoE trained on 45T tokens, with 1M context, under Apache 2.0, plus a preview Inkling-Small (276B / 12B active), positioned for customization via its Tinker fine-tuning platform.
Key facts
- 975B total / 41B active parameters; 45T training tokens across text, images, audio, video; 1M context
- Benchmarks (effort=0.99): HLE with tools 46.0%, AIME 2026 97.1%, SWE-bench Verified 77.6%, GPQA Diamond 87.2%
- Safety: 78.0% FORTRESS, 98.6% StrongREJECT
- Inkling-Small preview: 276B total / 12B active
- License Apache 2.0; available on Hugging Face, Tinker, Together, Fireworks, Modal, Databricks, Baseten
- ARC Prize: Inkling 36.5% on ARC-AGI-2; Inkling Small 40.1%
What happened
Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, shipped its first broadly usable model as fully open weights under Apache 2.0. Inkling is a sparse MoE with native text/image/audio reasoning and controllable thinking effort, distributed through major inference providers and the company's own Tinker fine-tuning service.
Why it matters
It is the most capable permissively licensed (Apache 2.0) US-origin open model at release, giving Western developers a counterweight to Chinese open-weights leaders, and it underpins Thinking Machines' bet that customers want to own and fine-tune their models.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
Sources (5)
- officialThinking Machines: Inkling, our open-weights model
- docsInkling model card
- officialHugging Face blog: Welcome Inkling
- pressTechCrunch: Thinking Machines' first open model, Inkling
- discussionSimon Willison on Inkling
id: 2026-07-15-thinking-machines-inkling · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline