Inkling: From an OpenAI Exodus Team to a 975B Open Flagship, and Tinker's Fine-Tuning Bet
Thinking Machines Lab (founded 2025 by Mira Murati, $2B seed at a $12B valuation) released Inkling in July 2026 under Apache 2.0 (975B total / 41B active params, 1M context, native multimodality, controllable thinking effort) plus a smaller Inkling-Small (276B / 12B), paired with the Tinker fine-tuning platform—turning customizability itself into the product.