Simon Willison's Weblog·3 months ago·
45
● 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.
Thinking Machines launched Inkling, its first open-weights model with a 1M-token context window supporting text, images and audio, available on the Tinker fine-tuning platform. The model is positioned for custom fine-tuning as startups increasingly shift workloads from frontier models to self-hosted versions, with alternatives like GLM-5.2 gaining adoption despite lacking vision capabilities. The release reflects a growing market trend toward open-source and customized AI models rather than reliance on leading proprietary systems.
The article says the authors partnered with Sable to help close a gap in how customers understand what AI can do by enabling AI-led customer calls. It cites that +150 companies are already on Sable’s waitlist. This results in Sable deploying “Aidan,” its multimodal AI employee, for enterprise customer interactions using vision, voice, video, and real-time browser use.
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