On July 15, 2026, Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling, its first model: a 975-billion-parameter multimodal mixture-of-experts (about 41B active per query) trained from scratch on 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio and video, under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. The company frames it around customization and ownership rather than topping benchmarks.
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Mira Murati's Thinking Machines releases Inkling, an Apache-2.0 open model
Why this matters for founders
If you need a model you can self-host, fine-tune and ship commercially without usage restrictions, an Apache-2.0 open-weight base like Inkling avoids per-token API lock-in; weigh infra cost against API convenience.
Source: TechCrunch
SaaS / SoftwareEnterprise SoftwareHardware / IoT #ai-tools#engineering#open-weight#product#fundraising
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