Thinking Machines launches Inkling, its first open-weight multimodal model
Thinking Machines has released Inkling, its first open-weight model and the first entry in a broader model family. The launch drew attention because multiple posts described it as a 975B-total, 41B-active multimodal MoE with a 1M context window, and because the company paired the announcement with Tinker fine-tuning, a Playground, and immediate ecosystem availability.
Key details
The official account said Inkling can perform efficient reasoning across text, images, and audio, and that full weights will be opened. Multiple posts relaying the model card described it as roughly a 1T-parameter model under an Apache-2 license, with support for a 1M-token context window; they also said it was trained from scratch on 48T tokens spanning text, images, and audio. The company later added that Inkling is only the start of a series: a lighter Inkling-Small with a similar training recipe has already been previewed, and more complete weights will continue to be released.
Launch and ecosystem
Beyond Tinker and the Playground, a Databricks announcement relayed by @Yuchenj_UW said Inkling was available on Databricks as a Day 0 launch partner. The company also highlighted that thinkingmachines/Inkling appeared on Hugging Face trending, where it was labeled as an image-text-to-text pipeline and also showed audio-text-to-text support.
Reactions
On positioning, @natolambert said the model card and benchmark information suggest Inkling is clearly stronger than Nemotron Ultra. @deedydas described it as the strongest open-weight model outside China. @bindureddy was more cautious, saying the main significance is that the U.S. open-weight camp finally has a model serious enough to benchmark closely.
2026-07-16 ~ 2026-07-17 · 169 related posts
- Episode 1: Thinking Machines launches Inkling, its first open-weight multimodal model(2026-07-16, 169 posts)
- Episode 2: Inkling Performance and Related Architecture Speculation(2026-07-16, 7 posts)
- Episode 3: New Open-Source Model Inkling Falls Short in Tests(2026-07-16, 2 posts)
- Inkling Evaluation and Positioning Revealed — natolambert · 2026-07-16
- Inkling: A 1T Parameter Open-Source Multimodal Model — natolambert · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Safety Eval Shows No Significant Risk Increase — natolambert · 2026-07-16
- [source] Inkling Released: A Cross-Modal Reasoning Model — thinkymachines · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Released: Multimodal with Strong Audio Capabilities — thinkymachines · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Highlights Cost and Latency Advantages — thinkymachines · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Family Will Include a Small Version — thinkymachines · 2026-07-16
- [source] Inkling to Receive a Lightweight Version — thinkymachines · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Released with Open Weights — TheZachMueller · 2026-07-16
- Thinking Machines Releases First Open-Weight Model — WhyLifeIs4 · 2026-07-16
- Thinking Machines Releases First Open-Weight Model — WhyLifeIs4 · 2026-07-16
- Inkling: Open-Weight Multimodal Model — markjeffrey · 2026-07-16
- Thinking Machines Releases Inkling — daniel_mac8 · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Released with Day-0 Inference Support — simonguozirui · 2026-07-16
- New Open-Source Multimodal Model Announced — Xianbao_QIAN · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Model Architecture Closely Mirrors DeepSeek V3 — a_karvonen · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Model Specs, Architecture Details & SGLang Support — BanghuaZ · 2026-07-16
- Thinking Machines Releases Open-Source Multimodal Model Inkling — clarejtbirch · 2026-07-16
- Thinking Machines Engineer Retrospective on Open-Source Model Development — jonlachman · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Released with 15% Speed Boost — LysandreJik · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Open-Source Model Released — BanghuaZ · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Opens Weights and Integrates with Tinker — simonguozirui · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Open Model Supports 1M Context — simonguozirui · 2026-07-16
- John Schulman on the Development of the Inkling Model — saurabh_garg67 · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Open Source Release: Multimodal & Long Context — ChrissGPT · 2026-07-16
- Inkling: 1T Open-Source Multimodal Model — SonglinYang4 · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Released with Open Weights — jonlachman · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Opens for Fine-Tuning — simonguozirui · 2026-07-16
- Thinking Machines Launches Inkling — ArtificialAnlys · 2026-07-16
- Restatement of Inkling Benchmark Scores — ArtificialAnlys · 2026-07-16
- Additional Insights on Inkling Efficiency and Scores — ArtificialAnlys · 2026-07-16
- Recap of Inkling Benchmark Details — ArtificialAnlys · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Benchmark Results Supplement — ArtificialAnlys · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Performance and Benchmark Updates — ArtificialAnlys · 2026-07-16
- Thinkymachines Releases Open-Weight Inkling — jonlachman · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Releases Full Weights and Supports Fine-Tuning — _xjdr · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Details: An Open-Weight General Multimodal Model — clarejtbirch · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Draws Attention in the Open-Source Community — bindureddy · 2026-07-16
- Inkling Lands on Databricks — Yuchenj_UW · 2026-07-16
- Inkling's open-source training stack is ready — BanghuaZ · 2026-07-16
- Inkling release paves the way for next-gen models — jonlachman · 2026-07-16
- Inkling open-weight multimodal model released — clarejtbirch · 2026-07-16
- Inkling seen as a strong base for fine-tuning — clarejtbirch · 2026-07-16
7 near-duplicate retellings: TheZachMueller · simonguozirui · daniel_mac8 · ChrissGPT · AAAzzam · MaziyarPanahi · BanghuaZ