Thinking Machines Lab Releases Inkling: 975B Open-Weight Multimodal MoE
Thinking Machines Lab
Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released Inkling on July 15 — its first open-weight foundation model. Architecture: 975B total parameters, 41B active per token via 256 routed experts (6 active), trained on 45T tokens of text, image, audio, and video. Outputs are text-only. Key specs: 1M-token context window, controllable thinking effort dial, 77.6% on SWEBench Verified, 97.1% on AIME 2026, 87.2% GPQA Diamond, 46% HLE with tools. A companion Inkling-Small (276B total / 12B active) also ships. Weights are on HuggingFace under Apache 2.0; inference is available via Tinker, TogetherAI, Fireworks, Modal, and Databricks.
Why it matters
Inkling is the strongest open-weight multimodal MoE to come from a US lab since Llama 4, with SWEBench numbers rivaling frontier closed models. Its Apache 2.0 license and controllable reasoning budget make it immediately relevant for agentic coding infrastructure and fine-tuning workflows.
Importance: 4/5
Frontier-tier open-weight MoE from ex-OpenAI CTO; confirmed by Bloomberg, TechCrunch, VentureBeat (4+ confirmations); Apache 2.0 with SOTA SWEBench scores