After months of anticipation, Mira Murati's AI startup, Thinking Machines, has officially stepped into the spotlight with the launch of Inkling, its first open-weight artificial intelligence model.
The debut marks a significant milestone for the company, which has quickly become one of the most closely watched names in the AI industry. Rather than building another closed ecosystem, Thinking Machines is taking a different route by giving developers and businesses the freedom to download, customize, and fine-tune the model for their own applications.
Inkling is built on a mixture-of-experts architecture that activates only the parts of the model required for a specific task, making it more computationally efficient while maintaining strong performance across reasoning, coding, and multimodal workloads. The model is designed to process text, images, audio, and video, allowing enterprises to build AI solutions tailored to their specific needs.
The launch reflects a broader shift in the AI industry, where businesses are increasingly looking for flexible and customizable alternatives to proprietary models. Instead of relying entirely on closed AI platforms, organizations are seeking solutions that offer greater control over deployment, data privacy, and performance optimization.
For Thinking Machines, Inkling is more than just a product launch—it's the company's first major statement in one of the world's most competitive technology markets. Led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, the startup is positioning itself as a champion of open, enterprise-ready AI.
As the competition between open-weight and closed AI models intensifies, Inkling's success could influence how the next generation of artificial intelligence is built, adopted, and deployed across industries.
Filed by
Startup Unplugged
