AI startup Thinking Machines revealed on Wednesday a new artificial intelligence model that could serve as one of the few alternatives to popular open-source offerings from Chinese AI labs.
Named Inkling, the model is open-weight, meaning users can download, run and customize the underlying systems, unlike proprietary, closed-source models. It is the first general-purpose model release to come out of Thinking Machines, a San Francisco-based startup founded last year by OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati.
The model is Thinking Machines Lab’s first public proof point after a year and a half spent building AI infrastructure largely out of public view. Some of that work had already surfaced in a May research preview of “interaction models” — AI designed to listen and speak (and even interrupt) instead of stop and wait as with typical chatbots.
It’s also a test of the central bet behind the startup, which is that AI that organizations can adapt for themselves will outperform the one-size-fits-all models the biggest labs currently sell.
Thinking Machines launched its first product called Tinker, which helps customize AI models, last October. Inkling is available on Tinker and other developer platforms, it said. The model has 975 billion parameters — variables that determine how an AI system processes information — making it one of the largest models of its kind.
The open-source ecosystem in the West lags behind its counterpart in China, especially in the wake of a void left by Meta which changed course to a proprietary approach after the disappointing release of its open Llama 4 model last year.
Thinking Machines doesn’t claim Inkling is best-in-class. Its newest blog post states explicitly that Inkling is “not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed.” What it’s evidently going for instead is well-rounded performance.
Businesses have in turn flocked to adopt Chinese models as the primary alternatives to expensive closed-source models. Hedge fund Bridgewater Associates used Tinker to build a custom version of Qwen, a model developed by China’s Alibaba which it said outperformed top proprietary models at lower costs.
Thinking Machines published a series of benchmarks that compared Inkling’s capabilities with closed models from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, as well as leading open offerings, most of them from Chinese labs.
While those other models maintain the edge on performance overall, Inkling put in a competitive showing, particularly on agent-related tasks, that could spur interest from prospective users.
Source: Reuters
