Thinking Machines releases Inkling — its first open-weights model, a near-trillion-parameter multimodal base built for fine-tuning

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab published Inkling, its first open-weights model: a 975B-total-parameter mixture-of-experts (about 41B active), natively multimodal across text, image, audio, and video, with a 1M-token context window. It's positioned not as a benchmark-topper but as a customization base, with fine-tuning through the lab's Tinker platform — and it hit #1 trending on Hugging Face within hours.

What it means A frontier-lab open base model designed for fine-tuning changes the build-vs-rent calculus for any team that needs a domain-specialized model.