TechCrunch and Fortune report that Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released Inkling, its first in-house model and its first open-weight one. It's a mixture-of-experts system with 975 billion total parameters that activates about 41 billion per task, trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, image, audio and video. Unlike flagships from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, anyone can download the full weights from Hugging Face and fine-tune the model on the company's Tinker platform. Thinking Machines is candid that Inkling is "not the strongest overall model available today," betting instead that enterprises value a model they can fully customize over a marginally smarter closed one. It's also a bid to challenge China's lead in freely available AI.