Thinking Machines Releases Inkling Open-Weight Model
Simon Willison · rss · 2026-07-16
Thinking Machines Lab has released its first open-weight model, Inkling.
- It is a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer with 975B total parameters / 41B active parameters.
- Licensed under Apache-2.0, it is positioned as a multimodal foundation model ready for fine-tuning, rather than a frontier-leading model.
- Training data covers 45 trillion tokens, including text, images, audio, and video.
- Inkling-Small (276B total / 12B active parameters) was also teased, though weights will be released after testing.
The author believes this version is a competitive new option in the US open-weight ecosystem, comparable to Chinese open-source models. The post includes examples of the model generating SVGs and describing images, though it misidentified a bird in an image as a "stork or seagull".
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