Thinking Machines Inkling Small
Mira Murati's studio jumping straight into heavyweight open weights is a bold bet that frontier-lab craft works without a closed API, and it directly challenges the narrative that open-weight leadership now belongs to Chinese labs. The "strongest western" label will be stress-tested within days against DeepSeek, Qwen and Kimi, where self-reported claims tend to evaporate fast.… more
The most telling detail is the token bill: agent-grade quality bought through sharply higher token consumption shifts the cost battle to inference, which can quietly erode the usual price advantage of open models. Everything now hinges on the actual license terms and whether independent evals confirm the benchmarks. In our view, this is a genuine shake-up of the western open-weight field rather than hype — but the burden of proof is on Thinking Machines.
Thinking Machines' Inkling 2 Small claims top spot among western open-weight models
Thinking Machines, the startup from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is releasing Inkling 2 Small, a mixture-of-experts model with 594 billion parameters. The company claims it's the strongest western open-weight model. Better agentic performance comes at a price, th…
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The Decoder
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