Written by Jakub Rusinowski · Last updated July 10, 2026
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines just shipped Inkling — a 975-billion-parameter, Apache-2.0 model that natively understands text, images and audio, handles a 1-million-token context, and fires only ~41B parameters per token. Here's what it is, how it benchmarks, what it takes to run, and the open-weights bet behind giving it away — with infographics you can skim.
On July 15, 2026, Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab shipped its first model — and it isn't a chatbot you log into. It's Inkling, a roughly one-trillion-parameter, open-weights, multimodal model you can download from Hugging Face, run on your own hardware, and fine-tune however you like. For a lab that stayed mostly quiet through its first year, it's a statement release. Here's what Inkling actually is, what's clever about it, how it benchmarks — and the strategic bet behind giving it away. Thinking Machines Lab was founded in February 2025 by Mira Murati, OpenAI's former CTO, alongside a gro…