Inkling: Our open-weights model
Simon Willison Simon Willison ● Covered by 3 sources
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling, an open-weights multimodal transformer with 975 billion total parameters and 41 billion active parameters, licensed under Apache 2.0 and trained on 45 trillion tokens. A smaller version with 276 billion parameters is in testing. The model is positioned as a strong base for fine-tuning rather than a frontier model and competes with other open-weights alternatives like NVIDIA Nemotron and Gemma 4.
Why it matters
Inkling: Our open-weights model Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab just released their first open-weights model. Inkling is "a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 975B total parameters, 41B active" - an Apache-2.0 licensed multimodal model trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio and video. They're also promising Inkling-Small, a 276B (12B active) model, but that's still being tested and the weights will be released "once that work is complete". The model card is much shorter than I've come to expect from US AI labs. It links to even shorter Training Data Documentation with almost nothing of interest in it - it's best summarized by these two paragraphs: The datasets Thinking Machines Lab uses to develop its AI services includes content that is in the public domain as well as content that may be subject to intellectual property protection. Thinking Machines Lab’s services were developed using publicly available content obtained from the open internet and publicly accessible
