# Mira Murati’s 975B Inkling Doesn’t Beat GPT or Claude. That’s the Point.

> Source: <https://pub.towardsai.net/mira-muratis-975b-inkling-doesn-t-beat-gpt-or-claude-that-s-the-point-4a6aaa240533?source=rss----98111c9905da---4>
> Published: 2026-07-17 19:01:01+00:00

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# Mira Murati’s 975B Inkling Doesn’t Beat GPT or Claude. That’s the Point.

*Thinking Machines shipped it under the Apache 2.0 licence, the most permissive licence there is. It tops no leaderboard, because it was built to be fine-tuned into yours, not to win one.*

On 15 July 2026, Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab released its first model, Inkling, and then did something labs almost never do on launch day: it published the benchmarks it loses. On the [model card](https://thinkingmachines.ai/model-card/inkling/), Inkling posts 77.6% on SWE-bench, verified against Claude Fable 5’s 95.0, 46.0% on Humanity’s Last Exam with tools against Fable 5’s 64.5, and 87.2% on GPQA Diamond against the 94.1 the closed frontier is running. It does not top any of the headline leaderboards. For a debut from the most-watched startup in AI, founded by the woman who ran research at OpenAI, that reads at first like a miss.

It is not a miss. It is the whole strategy, and the tell is the licence. Inkling is a 975-billion-parameter multimodal model released under [Apache 2.0](https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/16/former-openai-cto-does-what-altman-wont-releases-a-frontier-ai-model-thats-actually-open/), which is to say you can download it, run it, fine-tune it, sell what you build on it, and strip it for parts, with no permission and no strings. That is the most permissive terms a frontier-scale model has ever shipped under. Murati’s answer to the…