Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Ships Inkling — and Gives Away the Weights

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab released its first public model, Inkling — a 975-billion-parameter system (about 41 billion parameters active per query) that understands video and audio. After roughly eighteen months of largely private work and $2 billion raised at a $12 billion valuation, the lab's most consequential choice was to publish the model's weights openly rather than lock it behind an API, positioning itself as the open alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic. The release is confirmed across official channels (HuggingFace, the transformers release, Together AI's day-0 support) and independent journalism (TechCrunch, Wired, FT), with the Financial Times adding an independently reported detail that the design borrows techniques from Chinese AI labs. W ...