Mira Murati took much of OpenAI's product team with her and raised one of the most heavily funded new labs. Until now we talked about Thinking Machines Lab more for who leads it than for what it does. Their first public move isn't a closed API behind a key. Open weights - a model anyone can download and run themselves.
Fact
The facts: on 15.07.2026 Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling - a mixture-of-experts model with about 975 billion total and ~41 billion active parameters per request, multimodal (text, image, audio) and with a context window up to 1 million tokens. The weights are open. Per the lab's data the model was trained on the order of 45 trillion tokens. It's also available through third-party platforms (e.g. Vercel AI Gateway) as of release day. Source: Thinking Machines Lab, 'Introducing Inkling' announcement.
What matters, what's noise? Here the substance isn't another benchmark score, it's one word: open. A model of this caliber that you download and run yourself means control stays with you. Your data doesn't travel to someone else's server. The price doesn't jump on every request. And nobody can pull your access mid-work. Murati could have gone the OpenAI way - closed, behind a key. She chose the opposite. That's a position, not a technical detail.
A model you download and run yourself moves control back to you.
For those of us building on these models, open weights are the difference between a tenant and an owner. A tenant lives by the landlord's rules - raise the price or change the terms, and you have no move. One more serious open model on the market means one more option not to be a tenant.
Official primary sources
Thinking Machines Lab - Introducing InklingThe visual is generated code-art, no third-party images.