{"slug": "ai-startup-thinking-machines-launches-an-open-weight-ai-model", "title": "AI startup Thinking Machines launches an open-weight AI model", "summary": "AI startup Thinking Machines, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released an open-weight AI model called Inkling with 975 billion parameters, offering a Western alternative to popular Chinese open-source models. The model is available on its Tinker platform and others, and benchmarks show competitive performance, especially on agent-related tasks, as businesses seek alternatives to expensive proprietary models.", "body_md": "By Kenrick Cai\n\nSAN FRANCISCO, July 15 (Reuters) - AI startup Thinking Machines revealed on Wednesday a new artificial intelligence model that could serve as one of the few alternatives to popular open-source offerings from Chinese AI labs.\n\nNamed Inkling, the model is open-weight, meaning users can download, run and customize the underlying systems, unlike proprietary, closed-source models.\n\nIt is the first general-purpose model release to come out of Thinking Machines, a San Francisco-based startup founded last year by OpenAI's former chief technology officer Mira Murati.\n\nThinking Machines launched its first product called Tinker, which helps customize AI models, last October. Inkling is available on Tinker and other developer platforms, it said.\n\nThe model has 975 billion parameters — variables that determine how an AI system processes information — making it one of the largest models of its kind.\n\nThe open-source ecosystem in the West lags behind its counterpart in China, especially in the wake of a void left by Meta, which changed course to a proprietary approach after the disappointing release of its open Llama 4 model last year.\n\nBusinesses have in turn flocked to adopt Chinese models as the primary alternatives to expensive closed-source models. Hedge fund Bridgewater Associates used Tinker to build a custom version of Qwen, a model developed by China's Alibaba, which it said outperformed top proprietary models at lower costs.\n\nThinking Machines published a series of benchmarks that compared Inkling's capabilities with closed models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, as well as leading open offerings, most of them from Chinese labs.\n\nWhile those other models maintain the edge on performance overall, Inkling put in a competitive showing, particularly on agent-related tasks, that could spur interest from prospective users.\n\n(Reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco; Editing by Nia Williams)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-startup-thinking-machines-launches-an-open-weight-ai-model", "canonical_source": "https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-startup-thinking-machines-launches-180240740.html", "published_at": "2026-07-15 18:02:40+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-15 18:17:40.919664+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-startups", "ai-products", "ai-tools", "generative-ai"], "entities": ["Thinking Machines", "Inkling", "Mira Murati", "OpenAI", "Tinker", "Meta", "Bridgewater Associates", "Alibaba"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-startup-thinking-machines-launches-an-open-weight-ai-model", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-startup-thinking-machines-launches-an-open-weight-ai-model.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-startup-thinking-machines-launches-an-open-weight-ai-model.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-startup-thinking-machines-launches-an-open-weight-ai-model.jsonld"}}