# Ex-OpenAI CTO Murati's Thinking Machines drops Inkling, a 975B parameter model that leads US labs but trails China

> Source: <https://the-decoder.com/ex-openai-cto-muratis-thinking-machines-drops-inkling-a-975b-parameter-model-that-leads-us-labs-but-trails-china/>
> Published: 2026-07-16 09:55:28+00:00

Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has released Inkling, a multimodal open-weights model with 975 billion parameters. It leads U.S. open-weights models on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, though top Chinese open models still beat it on some tasks. Pricing starts at $1.87 per million input tokens, and Thinking Machines is pitching Inkling as a base for fine-tuning rather than the most powerful model available.

The article [Ex-OpenAI CTO Murati's Thinking Machines drops Inkling, a 975B parameter model that leads US labs but trails China](https://the-decoder.com/ex-openai-cto-muratis-thinking-machines-drops-inkling-a-975b-parameter-model-that-leads-us-labs-but-trails-china/) appeared first on [The Decoder](https://the-decoder.com).