AI startup Thinking Machines has released its first AI model, called Inkling, the company announced.
The firm was founded by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, according to reporting on MSN. It describes Inkling as an open-weight model trained from scratch.
An open-weight model means the underlying trained parameters — the "weights" — are made publicly available, so outside developers can download, run, and build on the model themselves rather than only accessing it through a company's own service.
According to VentureBeat, Inkling is Thinking Machines' first multimodal language model, and the company is positioning it around low cost and what VentureBeat characterizes as "resistance to censorship." Multimodal means the model is designed to work with more than one type of input, such as text alongside images.
The release drew attention in the developer community. Thinking Machines' announcement post, titled "Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model," reached the front page of Hacker News with 196 points and 60 comments.
The launch was also picked up by local and wire-style outlets, including a report carried by 1470 & 100.3 WMBD noting that the startup had launched an open-weight AI model.
Why it matters: a well-funded startup led by a prominent former OpenAI executive entering the open-weight arena — and emphasizing lower cost and fewer content restrictions — adds a notable new competitor to a field where many leading AI systems remain closed and tightly controlled.