Inkling Launched: Thinking Machines' First Open-Weight AI Model

Thinking Machines Lab has launched Inkling, its first open-weight foundation model. This marks the company's debut in the AI model race. Inkling is a 975-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model. It uses 41 billion parameters for each inference, which helps reduce computational costs. What's interesting is Inkling supports text, image, audio, and video inputs. Its weights are publicly available, allowing developers to download, fine-tune, and deploy the model on their own systems. This gives enterprises greater control over AI deployments. The company aims to provide customization and flexibility, competing with both proprietary and other open-weight models. This release is the startup's first major product since raising $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation in 2025. The bottom line is Inkling offers organizations the ability to modify and retrain the model for their specific needs, rather than relying solely on hosted APIs.