Ex-OpenAI CTO Murati’s Thinking Machines Launches 975B Open-Weight Model Inkling

Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, recently released Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter multimodal open-weight model. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Inkling outperforms other US open-source models, though top Chinese open-source models still excel in certain tasks. Pricing is $1.87 per million input tokens, and the company positions it as a base for fine-tuning rather than a general-purpose powerhouse. For teams fine-tuning open-source models, Inkling offers a new option, especially for those needing large parameter counts while retaining customization. However, its input cost is higher than comparable models like Llama 3 405B (~$1.0/M tokens), and output pricing is undisclosed. Moreover, it hasn't fully surpassed Chinese open-source models (e.g., Qwen 2.5 72B is better on some tasks), so teams must assess specific task requirements.