Thinking Machines、初のAIモデル「Inkling」を公開

Thinking Machines Lab, founded by Mira Murati following her tenure as OpenAI's CTO, has entered the AI model space with a philosophy distinct from the pursuit of raw performance. Rather than claiming to offer the strongest available model, the company explicitly positions Inkling as a base designed for customization and adaptation. This strategy reflects a stated mission to "build AI that extends human will and judgment," emphasizing user agency over centralized capability.

The technical design of Inkling supports this positioning. Its Mixture-of-Experts architecture with tunable computational effort allows users to trade off speed, cost, and quality for their specific use cases—a feature particularly valuable for organizations that cannot deploy the largest models but need flexibility. The 45 trillion token pretraining corpus spanning text, image, audio, and video positions Inkling as a true multimodal foundation, though the company does not claim superiority on specific benchmarks.

The commercial model—open-source weights under Apache 2.0 license, coupled with a paid fine-tuning platform (Tinker) and partnerships with inference providers TogetherAI and Fireworks—suggests Thinking Machines intends to capture value through customization services and deployment rather than access restrictions. The immediate availability of a lightweight variant (Inkling-Small) and self-fine-tuning demos indicate the company is lowering barriers to adaptation, potentially making Inkling appealing to developers and organizations seeking control over their AI systems.