5:19This $12 billion startup finally shipped something...
Thinking Machines and Inkling Thinking Machines, founded by Mira Miati, has released Inkling, a multimodal open-weights AI model. Despite a $12 billion valuation, it's the company's first major product shipment. Inkling is a Mixture of Experts model with 970 billion parameters, but only uses 41 billion per token for efficiency. It was trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, images, and audio, with a 1 million token context window. The model is Apache licensed and available on Hugging Face. Inkling's Performance and Features Inkling's performance is mid-table compared to top-tier models like Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Soul. A key feature is the "thinking effort" dial, allowing users to balance speed and intelligence. The model demonstrated self-modification by removing the letter 'E' from its vocabulary. Inkling was trained on "epistemics," rewarding it for admitting uncertainty, making it good at forecasting. It processes raw pixels and audio directly, bypassing traditional encoder models. A side effect of extensive training is its tendency to use simplified language ("caveman speak") to save tokens. Thinking Machines' Strategy The company's strategy is to offer a capable base model (Inkling) for free and charge for fine-tuning on their Tinker platform. This approach aims to create specialized models for specific tasks rather than competing solely on raw intelligence.






































