OpenAI's Former CTO Mira Murati Launches New AI Model Inkling

Thinking Machines Lab, a company co-founded by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, has launched its first artificial intelligence model, named Inkling. The venture aims to narrow the technological gap with leading AI research labs such as its former employer.

The Inkling model employs an open-weight architecture, allowing external developers to customize it with their own data. It features 975 billion parameters, significantly smaller than the estimated parameter counts of cutting-edge closed-source models from competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. The architecture reportedly draws inspiration from China's DeepSeek-V3 model and was optimized using data generated by Kimi K2.5.

Thinking Machines states that Inkling's design prioritizes a balance between cost and performance, rather than solely focusing on raw capability. With nearly a trillion parameters, only 41 billion are active for any given query, leading to lower operational costs and faster processing.

Inkling can be further customized using Tinker, the company's cloud-based fine-tuning platform for AI developers. The company has conducted safety testing on the model, assessing risks such as its potential misuse for harmful applications. However, the open-weight nature presents ongoing challenges for refining built-in safety measures.