Thinking Machines Engineer Retrospective on Open-Source Model Development

jonlachman · x · 2026-07-16

A Thinking Machine team member reflected on the entire process of launching the open-source model Inkling. They emphasized that building the entire pipeline from scratch—spanning data, pre-training, post-training, and final release—is an incredibly complex engineering feat ("taking a village"), especially the release of open weights. While there were many potential pitfalls and areas for future improvement, they expressed satisfaction with the current results and readiness for the next challenge.

Related event: Thinking Machines launches Inkling, its first open-weight multimodal model(169 posts)→

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