Simon Willison's Weblog·3 months ago·
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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.
A company released Inkling, an open-weights Mixture-of-Experts model with 975B total parameters and 41B active parameters, trained on 45 trillion tokens of multimodal data. The model supports a 1M token context window and includes a smaller 12B variant, with both available for fine-tuning on their Tinker platform. Inkling enables developers to customize and deploy models across diverse domains while balancing performance with computational efficiency through controllable thinking effort.
Thinking Machines released Inkling, an open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts model with a 1M-token context window and controllable reasoning effort designed for enterprise customization. The model achieved benchmark performance between Kimi 2.5 and 2.6, positioning it as a competitive alternative to proprietary APIs. This release enables organizations to deploy and customize their own models rather than relying on vendor-specific solutions.
DeepSeek released an open-weight reasoning model (DeepSeek-R1) that matches OpenAI's o1 performance, triggering a stock market sell-off of Nvidia and other U.S. tech companies. DeepSeek-R1 costs $2.19 per million output tokens compared to o1's $60 per million, a nearly 30-fold price difference. The advancement demonstrates that algorithmic innovation and optimized training can compete with raw computational scaling, shifting focus away from the assumption that more computing power is the only path to AI progress.
Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter open-weights multimodal model with 41 billion active parameters that processes text, images, and audio. The model was pretrained on 45 trillion tokens and supports context windows up to 1 million tokens, with an Apache 2.0 license available immediately on Hugging Face and partner platforms. Inkling ranks as the strongest U.S.-based open-weights model released to date, though independent reviewers note it remains behind top Chinese open models and closed systems on some benchmarks.
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