# The Blank Slate AI Strategy > Source: > Published: 2026-07-16 00:00:00+00:00 What does a bare-bones pickup truck have in common with a state-of-the-art AI lab? Both share a disruptive idea. In June, Slate Auto revealed the Blank Slate : a $24,950 electric pickup with hand-crank windows, no stereo, no speakers, no touchscreen, & no paint. 1 A blank canvas inviting inspired customization. A month later, Thinking Machines Lab released a parallel in AI, Inkling : a 975B-parameter model, trained from scratch on 45 trillion tokens, entirely open source. 2 If models could be colors, this one would be the gray. The company’s spider chart shows it’s a generalist model, good in many domains, a base ready to be customized. Thinking Machines isn’t giving the model away out of altruism. Inkling launched on Tinker, the company’s fine-tuning platform : the weights are free, but the customization charges rent. Selling customization is one way to commercialize open-source AI, just as accessories monetize a Slate. Ship a general-purpose base, & let the customer make it their own. Models like Inkling are the pickup truck of American AI : general-purpose, rugged, customizable, & the foundation on which US open source AI will be built.