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Mira Murati's Thinking Machines unveils first AI model
16 Jul 2026

Thinking Machines Lab, a new artificial intelligence (AI) start-up founded by Mira Murati and other former OpenAI employees, has launched its first model called Inkling.

The innovative start-up's model is open-weight, allowing researchers and other start-ups to download and modify it as per their requirements.

The company revealed that Inkling was trained from scratch to understand audio and video inputs along with text.

Inkling excels at advanced reasoning and coding tasks
Model features

Despite not being the top performer on popular benchmarks, Inkling can perform a variety of tasks.

It is capable of advanced reasoning and coding, thanks to its massive size of 975 billion parameters.

However, it does require a cluster of specialized chips for operation.

The company also revealed that they used Inkling to fine-tune and improve itself during the training process.

Model's reasoning evolved during training
Training insights

During its training process, an interesting phenomenon was observed with Inkling.

The model usually gives a natural language explanation for its complex reasoning.

However, to perform more efficiently, "the chain of thought became more concise over time, dropping grammatical overhead while remaining comprehensible and leaving the final response unaffected," the company said in a blog post.

Thinking Machines aims to challenge top AI players
Market impact

The launch of Inkling could help Thinking Machines make its mark in the highly competitive AI market.

Open-source models are preferred for their cost-effectiveness and flexibility for different tasks.

While the best open-weight models are currently from China, Thinking Machines claims that Inkling's performance is on par with those models.

The company's vision aligns with a decentralized approach to AI technology, allowing more people to build their own models using their own data.

Thinking Machines Lab's stellar team of ex-OpenAI executives
Company profile

Founded in February 2025, Thinking Machines Lab was established by several high-profile executives and researchers from OpenAI.

These include Mira Murati, former CTO (and briefly CEO) of OpenAI; John Schulman, a co-founder who played a key role in the development of ChatGPT; and Lilian Weng, former VP at OpenAI who led work on safety and robotics.

The start-up had earlier released Tinker, an innovative tool for fine-tuning models, and machine-learning research.