Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Releases Its First Open-Source Model Inkling

On July 15, 2026, Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released Inkling, the first open-source weight model trained from scratch: a 975B total-parameter, 41B-activated MoE multimodal architecture under the Apache 2.0 license, supporting text, image, audio inputs and 1M context window. The official positioning clearly defines it as a fine-tunable enterprise-grade foundation model rather than a top-ranked one on benchmarks. Its core differentiations include controllable thinking effort, the Tinker fine-tuning platform and private deployment support. This article sorts out the architecture highlights, capability benchmarks, hardware requirements and the position in the open-source MoE track, for enterprise developers to evaluate and select models.