Mira Murati's startup ships a multimodal, open-weight model it says balances cost and performance — but acknowledges it isn't the strongest available.
Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, released its first publicly available model on Wednesday — more than a year after the company was founded [1].
The model, called Inkling, is designed to handle queries across multiple media types while balancing “cost against performance,” the company said [1]. It is open-weight, meaning developers can download and adapt it freely, though the underlying training data and source code are not included [1].
Thinking Machines was candid about where Inkling sits in the competitive field: the company said the model was trained “for strong performance across the board,” but that “it is not the strongest model available today, closed or open” [1].
Filling a Gap in Open-Weight AI
The release comes as the US open-model market is seen as lagging behind Chinese developers in competitive freely available AI products [1]. Meta, previously a prominent player in open model development, has shifted focus toward closed or proprietary offerings, while OpenAI’s portfolio remains dominated by paid products despite releasing a pair of open models last year [1]. Thinking Machines is not aiming to monetize Inkling directly [1].
The startup currently generates revenue through a developer tool called Tinker, which is used for fine-tuning — that is, customizing — AI models [1]. Customers include hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, which uses Tinker to improve AI performance on financial tasks [1].
Backing and Background
Thinking Machines was founded in February 2025 by Murati alongside other former OpenAI employees [1]. The startup raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation last year and was reported to be in discussions about a larger follow-on round [1]. Several employees have since departed, moving to companies including Meta and OpenAI [1].
Inkling is also part of a broader product direction Murati has described as “interaction models” — systems built to let people collaborate more naturally with AI [1]. “Our interactions with each other are very rich,” she told Bloomberg last month. “There’s a lot of information in our interactions – when we’re silent, when we’re thinking, when we’re interrupting one another” [1].
Sources
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